A poem on remembrance, featured in Call + Response Journal Volume I
ancestors I
this skin stretches over fertile flesh
each pore
a potted plant
a mossy green bed
brown miles of possibility.
40 acres bred into my derma.
i work this land
i work it to the completion
of the hope that
kept my grand and grand and grand and mothers
awake at night
while the ache in their joints kept them
from the privilege of dreams.
Tori Ashley Matos is a native New Yorker, writer, actor, and artist now based in the West
Village. They are genderfluid, Afro-Indigenous, queer as all get out, and mad as hell. Their work focuses on the practice of compassionate but radical decolonization of ourselves and our societies. They graduated in May 2019 from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts with a Bachelor’s degree in Theatre and they have been published in Newtown Literary Journal and Name and None Magazine.