The writer who wrote the line in my title is ire’ne lara silva. Here it is in context:

… they will make us all into virgin
madonnas protecting mexicanidad
but our red
red blood spilt on the ground does not know
how to be silent we did what we had to do to
survive then and later in this life in the afterlife
or the life before the stories are not dead stories
never die we will speak our piece the living can
be silenced the dead cannot
(“what the ghosts of las adelitas say in the afterlife part 1”)

I’ve given the line prominence because it gives me an escalofrío and makes me whisper así es.

This and other poems in the portfolio of Poetry, April 2025, exalt a form of demanding, ceremonial horsemanship practiced by women in traditional female attire riding side saddles. The Mexican art form is known as escaramuza, and has its male counterpart in charrería. The poems make clear that the women of escaramuza have to put up with a ration of jeering from the males. Perhaps it’s no accident that escaramuza means “skirmish.”

… they say but
what if a man wanted to wear a dress expecting me to shrink back in horror
but i say the world will not end if a man wears a dress the world will not
end if  i love who i love the world will not end if i say this place belongs to
me too the world will not end if i live as i say i must live
(“machetona”)

Where style is concerned, I generally feel my gorge rising when confronting verse which dispenses with textual boundary markers. Formlessness can trigger freefall in which reading devolves into a construing chore. I discovered, however, that reading lara silva’s poems in the run-on fashion that such texts impose did not subtract impact from them. This is refreshing, and I think it’s so because her sentences are crafted with sufficient solidity so as to survive the rush. When I reached the end, I didn’t feel as if I had missed message. The lack of punctuation engenders a momentum of assertion that lends poetic force.

Postscript: My grandmother, a ranchwoman, had a side saddle. She was beyond her riding days when I knew her, but as a kid it perplexed me no end, when viewing the odd-looking rig, how she had managed to stay on a galloping horse when seated on it. My answer came with maturity: She didn’t gallop. But the escaramucistas do!

(c) 2025 JMN — EthicalDative. All rights reserved