by Marisol Cortez
As Women Who Submit prepares to launch our second anthology, Gathering, we will be featuring WWS authors across the genres and highlighting their forthcoming work.
Our first featured writer is poet, Marisol Cortez, a member from San Antonio. We celebrate this poem on its one-year anniversary, long before the winter surge, the election, and the Delta variant. It reminds us that although so many days from the past year/month/days bleed together, the past also contains distinct moments. This excerpt reminds us what life was like 365 days ago as well as what life is and has always been. It expands on the idea of loyalty and allegiance; connecting and reflecting upon this fast-changing and forever constant world.
Loyalty Oath: Dia de los Muertos 2020
by Marisol Cortez
I pledge allegiance to birds
and Black birders
I pledge allegiance to sea turtles
and silly gulls
I pledge allegiance to yard sales,
plate sales, voguing, ancient foraging
circuits: nuez, tuna, nopal, yuca
All the gifts of this land
we once wandered, not lost
like Cabeza de Vaca, but logically
seasonally ecologically
moving. I pledge allegiance
to dewberries growing on the banks
of the lake the Army Corps made
from dammed up river
and the red hornets
who live there too, whose protective sting
to my brow while foraging
sends me reeling,
falling
backwards with the force
of a strike
I pledge allegiance to sacred springs
I pledge allegiance to every wetland
and swamp that hid runaway slaves
and Native boarding school children.
May every effort to drain you
fail, may we fill you up again
instead, restore you, so that no
White House built beneath the lash
may comfortably occupy
your Potomac slough.
I pledge allegiance to rivers
that swallow up
ill-gotten walls and
the lies that built them
I pledge allegiance to the burning forests—
Amazonian, ancient redwood
and all alveoli everywhere:
from Floyd’s breath extinguished
beneath boot and badge
on a hot Minneapolis sidewalk
to the breaths of elders artificially inflated
by ventilators down in the RGV:
I pledge allegiance to all lungs, all breath,
arboreal or mammalian, Aeolian
winds of the body which
resist just by inspiring
exhaling
surviving
To read this poem in its stunning and expansive entirety, look for Gathering: a Women Who Submit Anthology. Preorder Gathering here!
Rooted in San Antonio, Marisol Cortez writes across genre about place and power for all the other borderwalking weirdos out there. Always a poet, for a time she strayed into an academic career, earning a Ph.D. in cultural studies before returning to San Antonio to write in service of movements to protect la madre tierra. A mama of two, she currently juggles writing, parenting, and co-editing responsibilities for Deceleration, an online journal of environmental justice thought and praxis.
In 2020 she published her debut novel Luz at Midnight (FlowerSong Press 2020), which in 2021 won the Texas Institute of Letter’s Sergio Troncoso Award for First Book of Fiction. She is also the author of I Call on the Earth (Double Drop Press 2019), a chapbook of documentary poetry, and “Making Displacement Visible: A Case Study Analysis of the ‘Mission Trail of Tears,’” which together bear witness to the forced removal of Mission Trails Mobile Home Community. Other poems and prose have appeared in Mutha Magazine, About Place Journal, Orion, Vice Canada, Caigibi, Metafore Magazine, Outsider Poetry, Voices de la Luna, and La Voz de Esperanza, among other anthologies and journals. For updates on projects and publications, visit mcortez.net.