Passage
by Ysabel Y. Gonzalez

The Middle is mostly where things begin.

Ripped from the ground’s earth that birthed Her,

footprints on tan African beaches scrubbed into submission.

Listen to the emptiness, pause: a moment of deafening stillness for a lineage fallen.

Or rather risen, like a sun on Easter Sunday.

 

A ship!  A ship!

Yes, here is where dreams take hold!

Hope, Death would make its request merciful.

Guilt lines Her veins, adhesive to the blood that sweats from pores:

                                                                       what fault lies in this skin?

 

Within pitch nothingness

hands and feet are shackled in needles and pins.

Kin you hear the shrill minds behind and beyond?

A colony enslaved on a vessel heading towards a resurrection of a limp spirit

sailing upon waters that transcend African mothers…

 

 

mothers…

 

 

martyrs.

 

Knots take root and Her spirit desires to soar amongst ancestors,

must turn a whip into a feather

transforming a penance.

Thus, resisting to succumb to unnatural laws,

mastering masks of deference.

 

YSABEL Y. GONZALEZ was born in 1980 in the Bronx, NY, to the parents of two proud Puerto Ricans. Raised in Newark, NJ, she practiced oil painting and various instruments in addition to writing at a tender age. Her poetry and short-story writing began to blossom in high school, where she enjoyed sharing her talents and her love of her Puerto Rican culture in the classroom. Ysabel went on to attend Washington University in St. Louis from 1998–2000 and Rutgers University from 2000–present, where she is majoring in Latino and Hispanic Caribbean Studies and minoring in English. She plans to graduate from Rutgers in May 2010.  At these schools she has had her poetry and other literature published in various school newspapers and magazines. She has also had her work published in Struggle magazine.

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