Poetry and Past

Erosion

Drip Drip Drip Drip Drip

One two three four five

I was formed like clay

Every relationship a drop of water

Drip Drip Drip Drip

Carving deep grooves

Drip Drip Drip

Every conversation a trail of sediment

Drip Drip

I look back on the valleys and curves

And I see who formed them

I look back on the past five years

Drip

And I see the canyon I’ve become

The End?

Why is it

Why is it that must now know be fully formed

What is it to grapple with the ties

Between childhood and adulthood

I am in a limbo

Just weeks before I am to be expelled into the world

To be sure of who I am

When I am just starting

Forming

I am just beginning to

Feel comfortable in these warm bones

I am just learning what it is to make mistakes

And to protect the child inside

To say it is alright to be scared

It is alright to not know

For the sun is setting on my journey

And the sun is rising on a new day

Who Am I?

Recently I’ve been wrestling with the concept of identity

Who am I, what do I identify as, is there a place for me?

(tw: war and violence)

A little history:

The furthest my family can be traced back to is Poland.

I have no ties there but as far as my grandmother knows, that’s where we lived before Romania.

Now in modern day Ukraine, my recorded family lived in a shtetl in Chernivtsi before World War

II.

I learned about the Holocaust at a very young age, as long as I have memories I have known.

Two hundred, take in that number, two hundred members of my extended family were murdered

in the Holocaust.

I’d grown up hearing stories about family members shot and killed in front of their other family

members, one story in particular about a family member taking off her earrings and begging the

murderer to deliver them to her family and inform them about what happened before she was

shot and thrown in a river.

Some of my family escaped.

Most of whom I am intimately familiar with managed to snag visas to Bolivia.

My great maternal grandparents took a boat to that country where they didn’t know the

language, and decided to take a risk and move away from the only home they’d ever known.

They were forced to leave their parents and siblings behind in Romania in 1938, their family

who refused to leave their home and believed that the rise of Hitler would not affect them.

My grandmother, who is my best friend, was born in La Paz Bolivia and raised in Cochabamba.

She grew up among the Aztec, Incan, and Quechuan cultures of South America and ate sopa

de maní (peanut soup) and salteñas (basically South American dumpling) for lunch and dinner.

Beatriz Dombrower moved to America when she was 18 with what she claimed to be not more

than 50 cents in her pocket.

She worked in factories to get by, and met her husband in America.

She needed to get pregnant to avoid her husband Mario from getting drafted into the Vietnam

war.

My mom was born in the San Fernando Valley and I was born in Camarillo California.

My mom and I have had the immense privilege of only ever knowing life in the U.S.

I grew up living at my grandma’s on weekends, and eating sopa de maní and salteñas for lunch

and dinner.

I grew up with Spanish as my first and a half language, speaking it mainly when I was with my

grandma.

I have tried not to lose Spanish, and the culture my grandmother grew up and struggled in.

I have tried to reclaim the Romanian culture my great grandparents grew up with and escaped

from.

I associate with the American culture I was cultivated and harvested in but none of these have

fit just right.I struggled with my sexuality for years, flip flopping between whether the crushes I had

on girls were in fact real and not a facet of heterosexuality.

I learned that the internalized homophobia I was born and raised into prevented me from

learning who I was and accepting myself fully.

I’ve erased myself for years, I’m learning to rebuild myself.

Not quite European, not quite Latina, not quite straight, simply an American fusion of all the

cultures that came before me and the discoveries I’ve made along the way.

The beauty of life, I have learned, isn’t that we are meant to be one way or the other, but

that we simply exist out of an act of resistance.

We are meant to keep the memories alive of those who came before us, of those whose voices

are lost to history, and look ahead to those who we will stand in the footsteps of tomorrow.