Button Poetry - Wolfchild lyrics

Wolfchild growls at the moon and everything black dances off my skin. I prepare for the inspection of my teeth and fur; the questions hurled like arrows about my body, where it belongs, what black ocean and filth marries my name to this form, and try to restrain the snarl; the muted whimper inside me, forever attempting escape. But perhaps this is more about blackness than anything; that unshakeable sister, permanent night sky. You always knew something about you was sinister. Indigenous, Native, Mexicana, Black. All names you wear in harmony until you can't. Until your Indigenous Studies professor turns out to be antiblack. Until your black friends joke about river crossing or hard to pronounce names and the coyote that brought your family to this side of the land retches a river of dead women, springs for your throat. You are & have always been the halfbreed that white men created, ‘el lobo', the wolf child of the n******g and the indian, slow and cumbersome, threatening the whole casta with your dirty blood. Can't afford the luxury of the tragic mulato, suicidal for her inability to fit within a black or white world, because you can barely fit in your own body, a history of mouths hollering just below your skin. Your first howl thrashed in your chest when you read the part of the book where Malcolm dies; You were a violent ritual of shook blood, each ancestor who survived the unsurviveable mounting each other for an escape out your mouth. each time after that, you begged the moon for answers, a reason to stay anchored to this earth, wistless & partially free. And the moon answered back: a star led you to freedom once. the sun exhausted himself to keep your empire beating. i don't know why your people stay looking to the sky for answers. a few hundred years ago, my brother was an aztec god, And jealous of my strength, he chopped my body to pieces, threw my head into the sky. "pobrecita con todo el mundo en contra de ella" You're lucky. What i would give for a body, to mourn?