Pushcart 2014: David Hernandez, “All-American” (Poetry) from The Southern Review, Autumn 2012

Kumi Yamashita, “Origami, 2005” (modified)

I’m this tiny, this statuesque, and everywhere
in between, and everywhere in between
bony and overweight, my shadow cannot hold
one shape in Omaha, in Tuscaloosa, in Aberdeen.
My skin is mocha brown, two shades darker
than taupe, your question is racist, nutmeg, beige,
I’m not offended by your question at all.
Penis or vagina? Yes and yes. Gay or straight?
Both boxes. Bi, not bi, who cares, stop
fixating on my sex life, Jesus never leveled
his eye to a bedroom’s keyhole.

Politicians have a fondness for categories; the fewer categories, and the more stereotyped, the better for figuring out what to say to capture votes. When their simplistic discourse filters down into the popular consciousness, we end up looking at people by one characteristic – age, race, sex, occupation – and ignoring the rest. Hernandez’ poem reminds us that there is no such thing as “The Latino”: that there are far more than fifty shades of brown.

Right from the first phrase, the poem sets out to confound expectations. When I hear “I’m this tiny,” I immediately expect to hear, “little thing,” a noun phrase of some kind; not another phrase contrasting tiny with statuesque. As someone who habitually sees at least twelve sides to any issue, I enjoyed this tour of the variety of people on this planet.

There’s a rolling rhythm to the poem, very conversational, with occasional accents of emphatic syllables (“I don’t hunt”) and a lovely chugalong at the end that meshes perfectly with semantic content (“gather the shopping carts into one long, rolling, clamorous and glittering backbone”) but for me the heart lies in the overall statement, and in the images that meld into each other:

                                                       ….Against
gun control, for cotton bullets, for constructing
a better fence along the border, let’s raise
concrete toward the sky, why does it need
all that space to begin with? For creating
holes in the fence, adding ladders, they’re not
here to steal work from us, no one dreams
of crab walking for hours across a lettuce field
so someone could order the Caesar salad.

Hernandez has recorded a reading of the poem on Soundcloud; there’s also a lovely video by motionpoems available on Youtube, for an appropriately diverse experience.