Daniela Ochoa
The Roses in the Tinted Glass

Let us deceive the 18th Century:

turn scrap metal into jewels and set chicks free

until man and cockerel

become indistinguishable.

 

Let them run hot-headed until

mothers’ cries—

dire, drenched, desperate

of the working class—

become our tocsin sound.

 

We won’t wilt because our mothers

have not known a beyond—won’t sleep

because the only fathers we know

founded a broken system.

 

We are roses: radiant, ready, real, and rattled.

 

We are preserved in the resin of greed.

Here we embody the last of

our remains, the fuel of the attack.