Salvador Meu Amor / Salvador My Love
Lost
Like a big transition is coming
One that I’m not ready for
I’m not ready
Things are going to be so
Different
Faster
In English
Devoid of that Bahian warmth
Cold
Complicated
Friendships that I need to evaluate
People that I need, to be honest with
Things I need to confront
And figure out
Because I just left
Loose ends
Unspoken pains
Irrational decisions
I just left
Escaped, to be honest
Because
I felt tired
Worn out
Uninspired
I needed something new
I needed me
To feel something new
To have the fire of hope
Lit inside of me once again
A glowing red and yellow
And all the colors in between
I needed to know that I actually am not
Alone
That I can love and that it will be enough
That I don’t have to keep thinking
That I am difficult to love
Because
Maybe I am
But I am worth it
I can make lasting connections
I am fun to be around
I am a good person.
I am a good person with a purpose
And everything
Everything
That has happened to me has only
Made me
More cognizant of who I am
Flaws and all
Has made me commit myself
To love
To growth
To people
Without that thought in that back of my head
That thought that told me that
I wasn’t enough
I am enough
Enough with the bullshit.
Math Teacher
I’m a teacher I say
Ms. Liriano
The young Afro-Latina teacher
I heard she’s from Harlem
Supposedly she’s from the hood
The projects, I heard
She’s cool, I like her
But she be forcing it with the demerits
Talking, out of my seat, off task, inappropriate comments, refusing to do work
She be forcing it, I thought she was different
See I became a teacher to liberate
Give them what I never had
An honest and critical exploration of America
Of knowledge and power
Of us and our beauty, our power, our history
Instead, I give demerits
Teach them how to solve systems of equations and rationalize denominators
Verify trigonometric identities and multiply binomials
I am a math teacher
Number sense, problem solving, logic, and reasoning
I teach them to sit quietly and immediately get to work
Raise their hands to answer questions
Respectfully disagree with me and their peers
Order is necessary for learning, I teach them
Order then learning
Order then critical thinking
Order then engaging activities
Order first, then everything else
Order then justice?
But they have to learn how to play by the white man’s rules I tell myself
If they can’t sit quietly, they’ll never make it through college
What about the job interviews?
They need to play the game and it’s my duty to teach them the rules
I was taught the rules
I played the game like a pro
Harvard degree with honors
No, it wasn’t because of affirmative action
5’s on all my APs 800’s on SAT IIs
I played the game like a fucking pro
But at what cost??
It cost me my humanity, my identity, wiped away the naked Black bodies of my ancestors en route to Hispaniola
The curl in my hair the swing in my hips
I played the game so well that I forgot it was a game
I became a teacher so my students wouldn’t have to suffer this loss of identity
Temporary amnesia that wasn’t so temporary because I wanted to be like them
Whiteness, was the goal
I aspired, I played their game
But still, I was
A child of the diaspora
No matter how hard I tried
No matter how much mastery I gained
Even after I mastered trigonometric ratios, integrals, derivatives, inverse functions
I could never master whiteness
That’s where order got me. I don’t want this for my students.
Jazly Liriano
Jazly Liriano is an Abolitionist/Creative Afro-Latina Storyteller from East Harlem. She earned her J.D. from Columbia Law School in 2022 and her A.B. in Human Evolutionary Biology with a language citation in Portuguese from Harvard College in 2016.
Great poetry, Jazly. Your story is inspiring. Thank you.
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