Tatiana Luboviski-Acosta is a Jewish Nicaragüense poet and artist who came up in the unceded lands of the Tongva people, and has been a guest in Yelamu, unceded Ramyatush Ohlone territory for now half their life. Their poems are rough sketches for weapons and spells against empire.
Follow the Corn
Eight thousand five hun
dred years before the common
era, the dome
stication of plants took root
acá, para llá, y pa
ra llí. There is no
such thing as wild corn. It can't
exist without a
ttentive human care. Did you
know that it was from the col
lapse of the Mayan
empire due to an increase
in exploitative
forced labor practices that
this tendency my mother
rejects in theory but
in her heart practices e
merged? She will tell you
otherwise but I will tell
you this: there is no such thing
as a wild heart – or
a broken one, for that mat
ter – in the natu
ral world. You are here because
of a coalition of
sisters provided
a complete protein, the dai
ly blessing of ri
vers and lakes and other run
ning waters, and because a
generation of
what we now call Lloronas
and Lysistratas
said no. Between you and me,
amor de mis amores,
entre estos ca
minos de maíz, turque
sa, y anarquí
a, we fall into the cat
egory of local wo
men – the innova
tors of emergent techno
logies that do not
exist in the natural
world – except, that you and me,
we are of it. A
mor de mis amores, we
are descended from
eaters of pond scum; from peo
ple who calculated the
passage of time and
knew everything that had happ
ened was happening
and will happen; who used no
thing as a placeholder be
tween negative and
positive.