BIO
Violeta Orozco is the author of the poetry collections, The Broken Woman Diaries (Andante Books 2022) and Stillness in the Land of Speed (Jacar press, forthcoming). She is the winner of Jacar's New Voices Poetry Award 2021, judged by Jaki Shelton Green. A diasporic writer, poet and spoken-word artist from Mexico City, she writes in English and Spanish. Her poems seek to honor the voices of the chain of women that stand behind her, acknowledging her ancestral roots and celebrating the Chicana and Latina Caribbean tradition by translating their work into Spanish in her monthly column in Nueva York Poetry Review.
LA MULATA DE CÓRDOBA
The folk legend
“And the ship
The Black Freighter
Disappears out to sea.”
B. Brecht (Pirate Jenny)
Five hundred years ago
a black ancestor clutched
the bars of a prison at a colonial Mexican fort
sentenced to death for refusing to fuck
the white mayor of the city of Córdoba
for as long as he liked
how dare she refuse his hand
a woman named loneliness
and yet he was afraid of Soledad’s revenge
called her black sorceress
Aliada del diablo
Bruja de San Juan de Ulúa
La mulata de Córdoba
was said to freeze the gaze of a young man
doomed to wane until death took him away
her special herbs would cure
the ailing health of women
and make unloving men
swoon under her spells
love potions and bountiful gold coins
flowed from her robes
into the hands of the wretched and poor
The holy inquisition had her locked
up in the Spanish fort in Veracruz
until she found
a piece of charcoal
She traced
the outline of a ship on her stone cell wall
a black freighter
with billowed sails
(A sailor saw her once aboard a pirate ship
her gold hoop earrings
flashing
in the pitch-black night)
Legend has it
one rainy evening
at The Gulf of Mexico’s gray shores
on the eve of the day
she’d be let out to be burned
her drawing was completed, so perfect every spar
and rope were standing
as if waiting for the wind
the guard stared at the drawing
sensing something wrong
he caught the threatening mast
starting to move
out of the corner of his eye
the enormous beam
towered above him
a charcoal drawing so alive
La mulata asked What else do you think it needs
to come to life?
Only to sail the jail guard said, and with those words
storm gusts began to blow
she broke into a laugh and waved goodbye
before she jumped into the deck
the ship sailed away in a dark storm
while the guard was left clutching
at a charcoal painting
sketched upon an empty prison cell.