BIO
Marian Flores is a writer and nationally recognized leadership coach with a long history of working in U.S. communities of color on issues of social and economic justice. Her writing is rooted in that experience and explores the intersection of exile, spirituality, and identity. She is an alum of the Kearney Street Interdisciplinary Writers Lab, the Napa Valley Writer’s Conference, and the Highlights Foundation's Whole Novel Workshop. A Salvadoran immigrant, she and her wife live in California's East Bay.
Farewell, El Salvador
Never a fighter who slept with a machete under the bed
I wasn't even a witness to the war.
I was a girl—empty, unblessed, hiding
in the corner of the painting, watching it all.
When my country married fear, I became a ruin of bones.
What could I do but guard my own borders?
I exiled my memories—the ancient turtle lumbering
across the lawn, the hamaca’s cocoon
the smell of cheese and corn, the parrot singing
Ave Ave Ave Maria Ave Ave Maria Ave
the priests gutted on the lawn. Now, the map of my country
unfolds into a history of massacres.
An archaeology of unburied martyrs lies in my heart.
Dreams of return, passports, and crossings
divide into endless branching roads where there is
no one left to hail. Ave Ave
I’ve Become a Nun Who Lives the Rule of Deprivation
I sit with hunger on the blue flowered couch
not the hunger glucose and leptin make
but the raging hunger for milk
that does not come.
The voracious roar of dame, damelo todo
rails in my mouth
angry longing blooms
red on my skin
my arms streak with welted tattoos
dead signs.
My wife wants to know what I want.
I can only cry
because a decade of denial
has milled the road
that was me in the before times
stripping the asphalt layers
that used to know how to want
even crave, free of the medical censor
the yellow Epipens.
There is nothing she can do, I tell her.
There is nothing to be done, I tell myself.
I enter a hunger strike of water
and salt licked from my palm.
A mother rises inside me
humming a six-note arpeggio
of consolation. She coaxes
me into eating what is allowed.
The loneliness of sweet potatoes
breaks the horseshoe in my throat.
Swallow, my love, I whisper.
Swallow it all