JEAN VENGUA

After Alex Tizon’s article "My Family’s Slave" as regards Eudocia Tomas Pulido 

(The Atlantic, June 2017)

Other Worlds

Nothing is excused; in a world where

no thing no quarter is given and they/you

the writer continually lean hard to left

or right excavate interiors exteriors to

not exonerate yourself or your parents

or to completely obliterate the woman

supposedly your “lola” (is not an option);

Nor is the reader’s first glance nor the whole

reading taken in piecemeal finally ingested

into the blood must will intend then drink

the interior of your body her pain our its

numbness their outrage as shared and

reposted to the thin lining of the cornea

the screen of her outing into the world via

journalists kuyas yayas cousins FB friends

Tweeters scholars the many doors care-

fully cemented identities of generosity guilt

kindness knowingness curiosity prods us;

Does not exonerate us woven into viscous

social fabrics cost effective marketplaces

family compounding mortgages long-term

lease loans student debt cycles of remembering

not remembering feast and famine cakes; let them

eat “not even the possibility” thus the sacrificial

journeys as if there were still other worlds

to explore resources labor bodies to extract ore

we are not the ones enslaved are we—always

leaving coming and going thinking we bear the gifts.




Jean Vengua is an artist, poet, community activist and author of Prau (Meritage Press, San Francisco & St. Helena, 2007).