Steve Werkmeister is an English professor at Johnson County Community College in Overland Park, Kansas. He was born and raised in Nebraska and now resides in Olathe, Kansas, with his family. His first poetry collection, The Unauthorized Autobiography: Composed of Fragments, Distortions, Mythologies & Lies (PunksWritePoems Press), was published in fall 2016. He has a literature-focused blog at https://stevesofgrass.wordpress.com/, and you can find him on Twitter @SteveWerkmyster.
Native Son
When I was a kid,
every old Mexican I knew
claimed their family was
really from Spain,
had secret Jewish blood,
or was part Gypsy,
deftly denying
the obvious aboriginal roots.
It puzzled me, literally.
I understand why no one
wants to say my family
was shit on by the Aztecs,
& then the Spanish,
& then the French,
& then Americans.
No one wants to say
my family got so used to it,
we crossed the border
to get shit on here.
Everyone wants to be
the child Arthur pulling
sword from stone,
the baby in the manger,
the prince, not the pauper.
But I didn’t fit that, either,
being half & half, marginal
even among the marginals.
So here I am, just what
you see: a not-quite Mexican
writing, a not-quite German
writing, a not-quite American
writing, content to handle my
words like berries, to
tend most tenderly
my lines like rows, to spend
millennia crafting poems
just like the land that wrought me.