Yankee-Fitted

In the South Bronx 
you could see slave ships sailing 
down Morris Park Ave. on 
concrete currents created 
down on Wall street.

One of these ships is called the 21 bus.
It carries Puerto Rican teenagers who resemble bobble-heads,
wearing Yankee-fitted baseball caps and blood-diamonds, 
plugged into MP3 players and mumbling the word, nigga,
every other sentence as proudly as their mothers
first spoke their names.

This concrete-jungle grows 
no cotton so they got our children 
picking hats off of shelves in malls instead.

New Era Imperialism comes in all colors and 
sizes, so what’s your fashionable preference for 
wearing slavery these days, mi gente?
Those eighths on your hat size are
merely their way of telling you they 
believe you are a fraction of a human
being.  Reduced like the price of
school lunch because Yankee-Imperialism
forced your college-educated parents to
move to Nueva York and pretend they
are janitors and maids, while you 
spend $20 to pretend you are your favorite Yankee.  

That money could have helped your 
over-worked mother buy milk and 
orange juice for the week, but you rather 
be a traveling billboard, 
a sleep-walking simile,
an extended metaphor on how to say
fuck you to your parents and their struggle.  

How would holocaust survivors feel if 
they saw their grandchildren wearing
Swastika arm-bands because looking like
a Nazi was in style these days?

Tell me, 
when you cock your brim to the side do
you hear 46 guns cock and point at
the heads of our 19 brothers and sisters who
were killed in the Ponce Massacre?

Does the “Y” on your Yankee-fitted look 
like Geogina Maldonado, pleading with those 
Yankees not to shoot, seconds before they 
made her body into a flute and blew her 
blood out those holes like wind…

Do you wake up with her bloody slap-mark on
your face?  I pray for you! – 
Pray that brim grows like Pinocchio’s nose every
time you accept one of those Yankee lies – that way 
it could cover the shame on your face when you 
meet your ancestors in the after-life and they 
ask you, “How could you support that 
capitalistic game that makes you rise to 
your feet and cheer every time the 
Yankees beat those

Indians

or those

Braves?”

Like celebrating the colonization of 
Puerto Rico 162 days in a year.

If you were to ask one of our children about Alex Rodriguez,
they would recite you the stats found on the back 
of a Topps baseball card perfectly:
32 homes runs,
132 RBIs,
batting average, .302.  

But ask that same child who Don Pedro Albizu Campos was
and he’d probably ask you,
“What team did he play for?”

I wish they made baseball cards for our heroes
so that our children had something worth memorizing.