Excerpt: “A Map of My Want”  - Winner of the CWA Book of the Year Award for Poetry

By Faylita Hicks

Do Not Call Us by Our Dead Names: A Docupoem

Chicago, Illinois | August 2019

 

Do not call us by our dead names! my sister yells

to the Border Patrol agent, her mouth knocked open,

overrun with the smoke of lavender; a womxn

under-loved, but alive, she exists—born running

loose in the Chihuahuan Desert.

+

I go by she/her and I am from Guatemala.

 

+

She is a savant of transitions having come

across two Americas. Twice. She says,

the first time she came, she came

alone.

 

When they put me in the detention     they didn’t know.

They put me                put me in.                    I told them

I am a womxn—but they put me in                             alone.

They said it was for safety—but I was alone for months.

 

The second time, they put me              with the men.

It was horrible.

+

 

 

And her name is a mirror of names flooding—

prayers I receive hourly via inbox. An email

from “Susana en La Ciudad” says:

 

La violencia—el feminicidio—me siguen

sin cansarse, dentro y fuera de Juarez.

Este humo sabe a fábrica. Ven aca, mijas!

Nos vamos por la mañana!

 

The violence—the murdered women—they follow me without getting tired, in and out of Juarez.

This smoke tastes like a factory. Come girls!

We’re leaving in the morning!

 

It has only been seven days since

she sent the message pero

where she exists now,

no sé.

 

+

 

San Marcos, TX | March 2020

 

I am still en la lucha!

con mis hermanas porque

 

 

my city is a river

of college students destined to be

swallowed by the rural expanse

of the Guadalupe.

 

En protesta, we comrades float

outside of the federal building,

—the county jail where I was buried—

En la lucha! against

the waves of the recently shipped,

the waves of the soon to be drowned,

and the waves of white faces swimming

happily in and out of the front doors.

 

In this war of mar y sol,

we are all Largemouth Bass

our tongues flipping back and forth

between dos idiomas porque

what happens to our people—

happens to us.

What happens to us—

happens to our people.

We are all still living

at the intersection of:

legal and barely legal.

 

We are a festival

of the county’s most wicked—

dancing, drinking, and chanting

long after

the music stops playing.

 

+

 

Austin, TX | June 2020

 

A Texas Parks’ infomercial explains that the Lavender Orchid Vine survives

into the low twenties. It can recover—even if frozen to the ground.

 

This is all I needed to know, so I turn off the twenty-four-hour news coverage

with its static videos of me

 

and other indignant Black womxn from yesterday’s rally,

some in our twenties, pacing outside

 

of Governor Abbott’s mansion, calling for parolees to be freed.

At the rally, the large braids and straight backs of us

 

Black womxn were bracketed by the fences

of the capitol’s manicured grounds;

 

our N95 masks, a dermis tagged

in the nettled dialects of our dead.

 

Some of us wanted our husbands back

—and not in body bags.

 

Others wanted to know: In how many ways could we be murdered

before we were allowed to be galled?

 

It was a familiar scene.

There were mothers there—at the mansion.

 

But there are always mothers there,

with their chins tucked, their chests shattering.

 

And there are still mothers there,

at the Pearsall Immigrant Detention Center

 

forty minutes away, shattering.

In Austin—the people’s heads floated

 

over the photos of their children.

In San Antonio—their heads still float

 

over the heads of their children,

now fallen flat and frozen to the ground.

 

+

Half-asleep, I ask if the highway is a swallow

of the unflowered—an inflorescence slivering through

 

the meaty brown thigh of the Southwest,

up the long Black neck of Houston,

 

and down through the empty womb of Corpus Christi?

I wonder, is it true? Has the highway always been

 

a violence—

a guillotine slowly severing us from our names?