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Willy Palomo
​

Mariposa Song for Assemina

            The Zebra Swallowtail evolved alongside the Assemina tree and her fruit, filling her low branches with
             brilliant black-and-white wings for millennia.  
 
Because she looked like a little papaya
to the same conquistadores confundidos
 
who jumbled up las Indias y las Americas,
now these new pilgrims pendejos call her
 
paw paw. Call her hillbilly mango,
Hoosier banana, another anchor baby
 
hailing from somewhere deep in jungle heat.
Imagine tongues hungry for everything
 
but your name. Imagine being here
for millennia only to be called exotic.
 
The first white man to write her name
in his journals also hewed her family
 
down for farmland. He returned
to Europe once he tired of enslaving
 
centroamericanos with centuries
of indio blood drying on his beard.
 
Peep this: he only came back to our Americas
angry not enough white people knew
 
his name. Don’t bother looking him up.
 
All he wanted was the gold under her 
skin. For her yellow to yawn wet between
 
his fingers. In the chirping dark of summer
moons, before he could draw a single border
 
on paper, we whispered her thick green name 
between our jaws & from our backs, beheld
 
bold black-&-white wings. We swallowed
& her leaves taught us to shimmy north,
 
nestled between low branches
for protection.

We laugh when you call her America’s
best kept secret. Tell me,
 
¿how does it feel to try to fit
her true name on your tongue?




Willy Palomo is the son of two immigrants from El Salvador. Wake the Others, his debut collection of poetry, will be published by Black Lawrence Press in March 2020. Follow them at @palomopoemas or www.palomopoemas.com





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