Original Sin by Victoria Jamilé Hernández
POETRY
I have loved girls since I was 7 years old / if you dig within their eyes you’ll find roots / they tell you stories with a wink / every detail is intentional / they love you eternally but with a knife close to the wrist / I have loved girls who raise their fists to break the sky / in order to see the sun / I have loved girls in every life time / decades of a song playing on repeat / sometimes the record players needle bumps and scratches / or the cassette tape grows tangled around my legs / somedays my pen finds you inside my poems / I have tried to scratch off your name but the indentation reveals itself underneath the layers / ink is thicker than blood / love heavier than fear / tears travel across the paper at rejection or the desire that blooms from my chest / I have loved girls under any punishment / electric or fire or spoken / how could you think that when you said I couldn’t, I wouldn’t? / authority is a laughing matter / and I find you fucking hilarious / your weak attempts only burned off the surface / the ground consumed my wounds / spit out as a snake / scales followed my back as I clawed myself out of the earth / I savored the burning as I hung fire over a branch / Eyes salivated as Eve twirled the apple between her fingers / licking at the smooth skin she sunk herself into the apple / body convulsing over the fruit as juices spill onto her thighs / slithering inside the core fangs sparkle as they trace stars /
The garden had never seen such a feast.
Victoria Jamilé Hernández (they/she) is a writer, teacher, and lesbian goth born in Río Piedras, Puerto Rico. Utilizing horror and fantasy Hernández writes about the experience of being a disabled femme-queer under a colonial power. Hernández is completing a master's in English Literature at the University of Puerto Rico.
