‘We Do Not Tell of The Things We Do For Love’ & ‘God, I Am Angry At The Things I Cannot Change’
Judy Jenks’ passion for photography began early, using polaroids, Instamatics, and other devices available in the 1970s. She mourns the days of film photography but is adapting to digital. She lives in Virginia and has published photography as well as writings of prose, poetry, and creative nonfiction.
We Do Not Tell of The Things We Do For Love
Put malevolence on a strict diet,
count its calories until just over
bone thin and weightless —
an owl’s frame — lithe and free
on the air, constrained to its proportions. Let it eat the snakes, the picking buzzards,
the unworthy. Your anger is not a curse. Predators, too, need to feed their young and sometimes love doesn’t look so pretty.
Put malevolence on a strict diet
but keep it near your bleeding heart — shelter and warning all at once.
God, I Am Angry At The Things I Cannot Change
so here I will list my grievances,
of which there are many:
white lady with a yellow smile
who called me Dora the Explorer
for my chopped bob and bangs,
girl who stopped being my friend
because my dad was too dark,
the original West Side Story,
classmate who asked me what I was,
girls who told me to shave
my hairy arms, femicides,
Taco Tuesday, the bastardization
of sombreros and ponchos, white cowboys, the English language, Spaniards,
mispronunciation of my last name,
the girl who had a crush on me
but called me a beaner behind my back,
Brits who can’t pronounce taco,
Nazi lineage Argentinians with
too much to say about diaspora,
my friends asking – giggling – wondering if they can laugh at the poor Mexican girl who died from a cocaine overdose –
pregnant – alone – younger than I am now, useless cops, my father’s absent father,
middle-aged white man that married
a teenage Mexican girl,
the language I hardly know
due to my own mother’s shame,
the kids who beat her outside of school,
all the many things she never told me
and would not dare to say,
her postpartum attempted suicide note,
my grandmother – the maid – the janitor – the babysitter – the help – underpaid,
the stories I’ll never get to hear her tell
again, her rotting house, her last phone
call, the chair she died in,
white women who call brown men papi,
drug cartels and drug lords and
drugs in neighborhoods and drugs
in a baby’s bloodstream, the town
my parents grew up in, vacationers,
chemical compound bubble baths,
God, I Am Angry… (Cont’d)
my brown-skinned-working-class Trump-loving aunt, Gen Alpha kids reinventing racism, a lack of sincerity, a lack of empathy, a lack of humanity, that lonely feeling of being the only off-white person in the room,
the quinceañera I never got to have, cut roots and lost ancestry,
names I’ll never know, faces I forgot, a community bent and twisted
and broken and beaten,
ICE raids, border patrol,
army recruiters in low income
neighborhoods, a loaded gun,
on and on and on until
we’re backed against a barbed wire fence counting down the seconds.
I am telling you now, God –
I am telling you that I am
angry at the wisdom I do not have, the courage that I lack, the grace I was not given, the things
too ugly to change.
Eden Lozano (they/them) is a full-time student at Cameron University. Aside from creative writing, they are a staunch cinephile with an affinity for all things sci-fi.
