Lara Mimosa Montes

Under The Gaze of the Others

But no one talked about Fanon that spring. Not once.
Or the restructuring of the world. Its borders, our loss.
And to make the something shimmer we let it bruise us.
If we are complicit, and I was, because desire. Because
Whiteness. But then my name would not be my name.
And I wouldn’t have to rely on this principle of accretion
To say something profound like, “Imagine writing
For the someone on the other side of yourself.”
A stranger undone by the love of another stranger.
A pastness so past I could not forget its goneness.

Lara Mimosa Montes

Lara Mimosa Montes is the author of The Somnambulist, a noctural autobiography / mo(u)rning diary. Her poems and essays have appeared in BOMB, Boston Review, Fence, and elsewhere. She holds a PhD in English from The Graduate Center. She was born in the Bronx.