Still, I long to meet my healing
language in county, or the dive bar

built in my mother’s eyes.
In my grandma’s rasquache-ass

backyard, toilets torrential
with cacti. Between bird houses

my uncle builds with scrap wood
painted with “section 8 okay.”

I don’t trust multi-syllabic words:
privilege, validation. Just shame.

I do not want my healing to tell
long, convoluted stories of origin

like a drunk Chicano Art Director
during karaoke, while the rest

of us just are trying to drag
our repressed affection in song.

I tell my cultured ass therapist:
It’s insincere! Phony! Todo fancy!

I do not trust rich people, or excess.
Clothes or purses or time or rigor.

If I’m being honest, I own a lot of shoes
that don’t fit. Today, I took a long bath.

I ate an acai bowl before attending
a yoga class and now I am writing

with imagination instead of memory.
I feel like a suspect and I gotta

be careful around myself now.
I pay for my healing with my

family’s lost time, my master’s degree—
what they did not afford themselves,

and did not ever want. And when
I tell my mom what I think

about when I do my healing,
I am embarrassed. I notice for

the first time, my expensive backpack,
the big, eager words in my brain.

Being a Mexican daughter,
I want to have an impact

on her brow crumpled like a
cheeseburger wrapper, surprise her

with a pack of Virginia Slims. But I
keep talking about internalization

and consciousness when she
just wants to swim, eat her favorite

tacos and talk shit about my tias
in my dirty apartment pool.

Contributor’s Notes

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 stays rooted in Fresno.