Master of Academia
BIO
Dr. Grisel Y. Acosta is an associate professor at The City University of New York-Bronx Community College. She is the editor of the anthology, Latina Outsiders Remaking Latina Identity, which features over 30 Latina contributors. Her book, Things to Pack on the Way to Everywhere, was a finalist for the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize and is forthcoming from Get Fresh Books in 2021. Recent works can be found in The Baffler, Red Fez, and The Lauryn Hill Reader. Dr. Acosta is a Dodge Foundation Poet, and a Macondo Fellow.
She can be found on Instagram at @grisel_y_acosta and at https://www.facebook.com/grisel.y.acosta.
you’ve
made me into such a pretty doll
you
like me that way: stiff-
limbed
like the immobilized unions
appeased
with banging pots outside the high-rise
windows
of leadership who hear nothing
refused
to look at my shaved head, an affront to
the
required subscription to gender radioactivity,
disintegrating
my DNA into long hair hedges and the many, “Oh!
Can
you explain that to me?” and “I agree with [fill in white colleague’s name
here]”
sentences
like a feminized torture made of hands, feet, and eyes
bound
with the pages of a canon that renders me invisible
silenced
my language into a cohort of students in the permanent
purgatory
of perpetual remediation, forcing them to write
stories
that center the exported version of your white
supremacy
and how it tore off their own doll legs at the border,
all
so you can say, “How sad,” and remind them of the difference between
“run”
and “ran,” making sure the battery in my own back is kept on low
and
the string you pull mimics your own voice
placed
a filter in front of my image that whitens
my
appearance, straightens my doll hair, renders me into a bland
soup
without flavor, like a classroom discussion devoid of application,
meaning
and context, obscuring the paths Black and Brown scholars need,
or
like the vapid creation of a committee to address the need for a committee
formed
to address the statistics that show that Afro-Latinx professors
cannot
move into dead muñeca leadership positions on committees in their departments
despite
tenure, I am an adjunct, a non-essential part, an accessory
ready
to be dismissed by the child who grew bored with its toy,
tossed
into a life without healthcare, certainty, or dinner
parties
put on administrator’s expense accounts, held under rotundas
built
brick-by-brick by our students’ ancestors who are forgotten by you
and
them, because all of the statues on campus teach them nothing about themselves
see
the doll you created, or don’t see it, it is your choice, your whim
meanwhile,
I have started a bonfire
set
myself ablaze
parts
are burning
smoke
is rising
facades
are there to mask reality
you
never saw me coming