Bodega | The Moon’s Sisters

The Moon’s Sisters

I stopped drinking coffee after Papita Fidel passed away

He always woke up at 2am to brew his first morning coffee

But today I’m brewing the remaining cafe de palo

In the hopes it will chase away my dream ghosts

Have you ever tried to photograph the full moon?

It’s always distorted

I don’t know what I’m chasing but

This morning I woke up

Again on the illegal side of the sun

In contaminated dreamland

In the middle of the night

The moon ruptured itself into a wound

her body is honey, rue and lemon leaves

Obscured in a white gauze

I am tired of contaminated dreaming

My grandmother used to say the lunares on my body, our bodies

Are the moon’s sisters

Each creating constellation armors in our flesh

I found a new one this morning on the top of breast

beatriz yanes martinez is a queer undocumented person from El Salvador. She was raised in Long Island, New York. In El Salvador, she grew up listening to her grandparents’ stories of the land, embrujos and their ancestors and now combines the tradition of storytelling to write about memories around displacement, mourning, loss, pleasure, queerness, silence/loudness, and re-imagining the self/childhood. Beatriz currently works with an immigrant legal rights organization in NYC while contending with the perpetual cycle of her documented/undocumented liminal status in this country. She was a recipient of the Brooklyn Poets Fellowship in summer of 2020 and a recipient of the DREAMER Poetry Scholarship from the Community of Writers Poetry Workshop.

103 – April 2021

By beatriz yanes martinez

The Moon’s Sisters