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Dismantling Racism Resource Book

Beloved Spic

- Valley Stream, Long Island 1973
by Martín Espada

Here in the new white neighborhood,
the neighbors kept it pressed
inside dictionaries and Bibles
like a leaf, chewed it for digestion
after a heavy dinner,

laughed when it hopped
from their mouths like a secret,
whispered it as carefully as the answer
to a test question in school,
bellowed it in barrooms
when the alcohol made them want to sing

So I saw it
spraypainted on my locker and told no one,
found it scripted in the icing on a cake,

touched it stinging like the tooth slammed
into a faucet, so I kept my mouth closed,
pushed it away crushed on the coach’s lip
with a spot of dried egg,
watched it spiral into the ear
of a dissapointed girl who never sat beside me again,
heard it in my head when I punched a lamp,
mesmerized by the slash oozing
between my knuckles,
and it was beloved
until the day we staked our lawn

with a sign that read: For Sale.

Martín Espada is a Puerto Rican Poet born in Brooklyn, NY in 1957. He is author of several books of
poems and essays like Rebellion Is the Circle of a Lover’s Hands, Trumpets from the Islands of
their Evictions, and City of Coughing and Dead Radiators. Espada is well known critic of the
colonization of Puerto Rico and supporter of the movement for Puerto Rican independence.

Dismantling Racism Project 42 Western States Center