My students are hope unhinged.

They don’t allow checkpoints to define
where or how they deserve to live.
They have made our classroom

an asylum from the inhumane,
a refuge from the things
that have rendered

their feet unworthy of this soil.
I bear witness
to their brilliance, but watch

the world try to confine them
to connotation. How it slings words
at them to suggest that their breath

is criminal, deserving of dust.
How it often does the same to me.
My black skin, their brown bodies;

our histories wrought with misconception.

We reimagine pedagogy to be
the art of unlearning.
Take all that we have been told
about this country and search
for the omissions in our textbooks.
How the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo

took half a million miles
and rewrote a history cast aside.
The way Manifest Destiny made

a masquerade of brown skin. How
it skews the way we contemplate
the antiquity of this melanin.

We pick up our pens,
reclaim a humanity
that was stolen.

Poems imbued with love,
memoirs laden with fear,
stories of worlds we have yet to build.

We write unapologetically.
We recalibrate indignity.
We document the world

ourselves.