Muse Found in a Colonized Body

Yesenia Montilla’s second collection of poems, Muse Found in a Colonized Body, examines colonization and gentrification as it is manifest in New York City, but also within the self, since “colonization can / happen to a heart as well / as a whole people.” While Montilla’s speaker is “generations removed from / the conquistador & the slave,” her poems refuse complacency, insisting that the “Middle Passage is still happening, except now we are being / transported in police vans to prisons made just for us.” 

Complicating Montilla’s consideration of both internal and external forces at play are aspirations to whiteness. In one poem, the speaker asserts: “I am // finally over my white boy stage / my apologies, I am a slow learner,” while in another she describes a threesome with James Dean and Paul Newman: “in times of peace my body / craves women, / but in times of war, upheaval, deep chaos; only / two men would do.” Elsewhere, Montilla invokes Sammy Sosa, a Dominican-American baseball player who admitted to bleaching his skin:

I think of him often                         barely remember what he looked like
but I can recall his                            hunched shoulders in the
dug out           his perfect swing                                                                   
& how maybe            he spit out                    something black
from his mouth            after every           single                         strike—

Montilla’s lyrics are often brutal, but there is humor here, too, as when Cristóbal Colón is described as “the kind of human / that landed in a place some called / paradise & instead of enjoying the view // he asked for organic eggs & cut the line—.” In “Karl Marx as Muse,” the speaker imagines Marx as a Brooklyn “hipster sitting in shadowy bars / drinking bourbon,” and wants to ask him to “take me to bed / tell me something about alienation that you haven’t already.” And then, in the very next poem, “Up on My Bougie Ass Shit,” the speaker admits to having “big dreams for big / things”: “The brie cheese priced at $30/lb / The face cream that promises to drop 5 years / The yoga class that suspends you in midair.”