Café Con Leche

The public school's lamp looking down at me

with it’s sonoluminescence boring me to death

I miss the technicolor. This new world is too pale

too new, too boring.

I look down in the quiet sound of students

White, Brown and Black

filling the bubbles with their gray pencils

for them, no hesitation

identity intact.

I stare and pause at the same words that always freeze me

Race:

White, Black, Asian, "Latino"

I look down at my hands,

trying to find the truth

of a skin that is bored to death

by those greenish flourescent lights.

I stare, desperately looking for my shade.

I see the white of the French, it’s faint.

Or perhaps

that’s just my Colonial last name

and I'm imagining the white, even though it's not there.

I turn my hand.

I know where to find that the white is not white!

The back of my wrist,

where my translucent skin faintly shows

the pastel blue hue of my veins.

My father’s body found in that tiny part of mine.

I stare again...

Too white to be Latina, too brown to be White.

A girl with no race, or hundreds of them.

the bubbles staring at me

is it ridiculous to fill them all in?

I stare at my legs, the café con leche on them, in them

the exact same tone as my drink, my legs.

I instantly recognize the hue, it lives in my soul

that hue that transports me back to my land

a land that smells of coffee

which lives in technicolor

even the music has color

even the feelings have color.

I take the mixer and I blend

like the swirl of the milk in the coffee

the words.

the blackness of the coffee

the whiteness of the milk

the brownness of the sugar

I mix, I mix, I mix.

Just like my skin

The blackness of the slaves

The whiteness of the conquistadors

The brownness of the Mayas,

The café con leche of my skin

too white to be Latina, too brown to be White.

A girl with a hundred colors

can’t fit into one.