Trapped Between Colonial Legacies

Trapped Between Colonial Legacies

Delaney R. Olmo

Remember ancient blue lace agate sky

Beneath howlite nestled fog branches, Etched inside earth’s perennial body.

Surrendering to night

blooming jasmine

Raindrops covering doe eyes

Emerging cradled woodland

carrying these ancestral terrains

©2023 Feminist Formations, Vol. 35 No. 1 (Spring) pp. 1–4

onto our backs,

Each time you struggle you must remember. Honoring the people and what remains, inside this resistance. Following the lulled humming

and shell covered rattlers

striking against beaded wrists decorated orbiting binary stars, Our ancestors’

mahogany skin

Sustains with us, luminescent alternating—wind still existing.

Watching Knotted Mirrors Unravel

When we nally arrive. We inherit language and stories beneath our borrowed skin and Teeth. Devote them to the keepers of embryo and womb, appoint history as a screwed frame

To widen the path for the keepers and dreamers, our hair is rooted ever growth nested willow reed.

When we speak our language, an ancestral star will echo our names. The way the morning sun

can recognize fragments. The way this lineage can teach us to wear our sea like rare velvet.

Insert our voices as sanctuaries. The knot of a proud lion, scattering eternal red ashes.

Delaney Olmo explores dreams, colonial legacies, intergenerational trauma, and the subconscious mind in her work. In her free time, she enjoys baking sweets and doll collecting.