Poetry by Elizabeth Ruth Deyro

To be a woman of color
 
To be a woman of color
is to walk along the edge, tiptoeing your way through,
wanting so badly to make a sound but            trying
not to because you know
too well that silence    and noise are
no different when no one ever listens.
 
To be a woman of color
is to be a warrior
fighting many battles at once—ones you
                                                            did not start     but can never lose
                                                                        even when you’ve always been
                                                                                    at the losing end.
You have bled so many times since your becoming,
but none of that had primed you for the bloodshed
that is your life—in the hands of men who do not know how to hold you right,
                        of the people who do not know how else to get to know you but to
                                    rip
                                                you
                                                            apart                and examine what is
                                                                                                underneath
                                                                                                this brown flesh.
                        Now tell me, after you unravel my body
                        do I look more like you dismantled?

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Elizabeth Ruth Deyro is a Filipina writer, editor, and Communication Arts undergraduate at the University of the Philippines Los Baños. She is the Founding Editor-in-Chief and Creative Director of The Brown Orient, the Fiction Editor of Rag Queen Periodical and |tap| lit mag, and the Nonfiction Editor of Cauldron Anthology. Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming from Ellipsis Zine, Black Napkin Press, Jellyfish Review, {m}aganda Magazine, L’Éphémère Review,and The Tempest, among other places.