chiquita bonita

by aureleo sans

Pluck me from my mother. Miss Big Banana, the largest trunkless plant. Don’t call her Chiquitita. I enjoy rough hands fondling my skin. I am a sub. I know my purpose: to be devoured and to be discarded. I freckle at possibility. In the wild, I seed the ground. Before the watermelon, “Drunk In Love” was my jam. Beyonce is no Harry Belafonte. The plantation workers always want to go home. I saw thousands murdered because they left us to rot, then they left them to rot and the smell of decay lingered longer than flesh and peel. I detest diaspora. I detest shipment. I yoke to a chorus of shrieks buried in a coffin and ferried across the river Styx and international waters. What if we all sink, to be devoured by a frenzy of fish, instead of to be displayed below fluorescent lights flickering.  Here, I cannot bask. They’ve altered me, stolen my seeds. They toss me into a bin, and I dissolve into loveless soil in a lonely place, a dump, the end of my line.

aureleo sans is a flamingo. She is also a Colombian-American, non-binary, queer, formerly unhoused writer with a disability who resides in San Antonio, Texas. This year, she is a Sewanee Writers Conference Scholar, a Tin House Scholar, a Roots Wounds Words Writers Retreat fellow, a Lambda Literary fellow, an ASF Workshop Fellow, and a Periplus fellow. Her work has appeared in The Offing, Fractured Lit, Salamander, Electric Literature, and elsewhere.