Killing the Ingénu
Valerie Tirado
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To escape our blood-soaked land,
we rather flock on frays of papier-mâché rafts
swallowed whole by tumultuous waves
than live where the ironclad hunger
for the metallic taste of censorship.
How to distill home from homeland
when—as a boy—I was stripped of my mother,
handed a rifle & taught to kill the ingénu
mid-flight. Before I’d close one eye
& bring scope close to the other, before martyr
was claimed & crucified by crosshairs of reticle,
I’d yearn for the wind below their wings;
for the whole of their unmoored freedom.
All these years later, I still recall the pangs
of my wing-clipping, my encagement near the harbor
where my only tether to life was the waves
pounding against the walls of my cell in protest.
O, how I wished to do the same.
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Valerie Tirado is a Cuban-American writer from Miami, Florida. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Bodega Magazine, Didactics, and Moonstone Arts Center’s New Voices Anthology. A recent graduate of Dartmouth College, she now works in clinical cancer research.
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Posted in Finding Home, Uncategorized and tagged in #boudin, #poetry