Cover Photo: Photograph by Lucia Macedo/okeykat/Unsplash
Photograph by Lucia Macedo/okeykat/Unsplash

Complicit Poem

When was the last time you chose / a glass of pinot over fair pay?

not complicit. But my rage, this page

department that employs me.

while I write to get free. And my friends

teary-eyed, and feel unimplicated

—what could have been courage.

a glass of pinot over fair pay?

our parents with pesticides?

of what white people choose to look at.

Desperate, they hurt each other,

then went to bed on a dirt floor.

acknowledgement as redeeming,

—a shame, fascinating—art?

or write, only spell their children’s

Criselda, that most fail to pronounce. Here

makes me responsible for what

solicit their absolution from my C.V.

like my mother in the July issue

your creativity look like?

that we are not taught

it can change the world.

When I write

I’m going back to the part of me
that didn’t do better

of my white friends say that.

Sara Borjas is a self-identified Xicanx pocha and a Fresno poet. Her debut collection, Heart Like a Window, Mouth Like a Cliff (Noemi Press, 2019) received a 2020 American Book Award. Sara was featured as one of Poets & Writers 2019 Debut Poets. She has received fellowships from MacDowell, CantoMundo, Sewanee Writer’s Conference, Postgraduate Writers Conference, and Community of Writers. She believes that all Black lives matter and will resist white supremacy until Black liberation is realized. She teaches creative writing at CSU East Bay but stays rooted in Fresno.