“Pigment of my Dreams”

I. Yellow

A lie in a room full of silence is uttered,
no help comes for these men and women.
The military throws students onto the pavement,
expects them to swallow down a world
where delusion is the currency of prayerful minds.

In a country where blessings equal greetings,
you reach for saving hands and find them hidden in the shadows;
you find them too thin to lift off the weight,
you find them too hungry to even think of you.
The only one able to hold you is the one holding the noose
almost desperately around your neck.

I pray for mankind, but a gun is held to my head
so I whisper sweet nothings onto the lion’s feet, and
hope for neighboring countries to take it as it truly is:

a plea for anyone, anyone, anyone—

“We’re sending them $100 now, $50 is no longer enough.

With $50 they can only buy one chicken or one bag of rice.

I know, I know. It’s bad.”

There’s a level of frustration in seeing lawyers and nurses
sell their bodies to earn their children a meal.
They now say what any good believer would say:

II. Blue

“Only God can judge me now.”

I think about that every once in a while.

Time slips away too quickly, and it’s been eight years since I last

laid on your couch and felt my soul quiet down to the rhythm of the air conditioner.

Mom calls you often enough, but I see your face less and less now,

yet you understand and I shame and I guilt but still I never
say the words:

“I miss you. Do you remember when we would buy pan dulce

in the corner store? It’s closed now, I know, you told me. But

maybe when it’s not putting your life in God’s hands to cross the street,

and another family sets up shop there, we could welcome them here.”

The family who sold our pan dulce moved to the States, my mom told me.
I don’t blame them, could never blame them.
But I resent them just a little.

III. Red

You are not the same person you were
when we saw you four years ago, and I am not either,
but there’s more essence of me than there is of you.
Your soul is taken over by survival, and
years of it morphs you into something close to a loss of pigment.

I know, because when we spent weeks in the war I came out

different, not better but more understanding and I still cry

myself to sleep knowing that without that goddamn war

we would never be able to look each other in the eye.

“The desperation claws your senses out and all that remains is the

skeleton that holds your body up. And who else could relate to me

but God? Who else but you?”

The last time we talked when our suffering wasn’t part of the conversation: 2920 days.

III. Seven white stars, not eight.

The truth in a room full of silence is uttered, and we are all shot dead for it.
Abuela, I don’t want the last time I see you to be with me hiding
tears as I watch you and abuelo board a plane back to hell.
Abuelita, you are the first and the last and the soil of the earth.

They turned you into a no-soul, manufactured starvation artist
who can’t get out of the bed at night and is trapped by her own
gated home. Dreams of this little old house shattered.

Let me build you a little old house
with a corner store right here in my heart.
just come, please.

Fabiana V. Chaparro is a Venezuelan born citizen currently residing with her family in Houston. A freshman at the University of Houston, she is a Broadcast Journalism and Political Science double major with an interest in creative writing. Her previous publications include a set of three haikus published in the literary magazine Better Than Starbucks’s December 2016 issue, as well as the literary magazines of her high schools, Edmond North High School and Obra D Tompkins High School.