BIO
Claire Calderón is Chilean-American writer and educator based in Oakland, California. A co-founder of the New American Story Project, she is dedicated to digital stories of the immigrant and refugee experience, and Workshop Coordinator of Las Dos Brujas Writers' Workshops. She is an alum and former staff member of VONA, a 2018 Hedgebrook fellow, and a graduate of the Mills College MFA program in English and Creative Writing.
For Joane
Joane Florvil, a 28-year old Haitian immigrant to Chile, was wrongfully accused of abandoning her three month-old baby and arrested on August 30, 2017. She later died at Hospital Clínico in Santiago of severe head wounds.
the Chilean tongue
yawns its vowels,
everything exiting stretched
into long strands or severed
coarsely at the hip.
fumbling to string
these sounds into logic, to raise
a cuffed hand to the cleft
your child carved (her smell of smoke
and saltwater, her soft),
you plead round mouthed,
not believing
this city of spit
and glares, trapped
exhaust, your Creole
a static, a street dog
whining as you wave
Super Ochos at car windows.
this country of simmering
rage, wounds stuffed
with Atacama sand,
abandoned plastic, clamped shut
with copper wire.
your heart is on fire,
the swollen muscle hissing
in flame. your skull, a fist
of twisted circuits, sparking
as it slams the cell wall, blaring
until sudden blood
swallows sound and light.
in your mind’s dark,
(place of palm shade;
wordless and warm)
your daughter moans herself to
sleep full of your milk.