KARLA CORNEJO VILLAVICENCIO [NOMINATED BY EILEEN MYLES]

THE ONLY ACCEPTABLE WAY I CAN BE APPROACHED BY ICE, A LEGALLY BINDING DOCUMENT

— I wake up very early, weather TBD, but not humid. Hair color TBD, either Kurt Cobain blonde with some grit, let’s say my hair has changed it’s texture from indigenous good girl pin straight but chemically damaged to Malibu tousled, I think your hair texture can only change when you are pregnant and I rather swallow a razor blade, but let’s just say. I go to the bank. There is a hostage situation. Oh, I am wearing a white silk slip, a negligee, and my usual Stan Smiths. I am minding my business, and I become aware of the hold up. We become hostages. 30 hostages! I am the only hostage of color. The rest are all white, all of them natural blondes, women, children, cops, firefighters, the works. They are frightened. The bank robber is a terrorist. It is impossible to know his race. I talk to him, and we develop a rapport. I earn his trust. The white hostages think I am a terrorist too and spit at me. I go over to the stack of hundred dollar bills he has set aside and pull off a rubber band and tie up my hair in a topknot. This is a privilege I have earned, this freedom of movement, this migration, through my diplomatic skills. The terrorist is a man is a man is a man, tries to kiss me, I stand at an angle, lean in for a kiss, then BAM, reach for the gun. I am not sure how I do it, but I do it, I am so fast. We struggle and I overpower him, even though I have no upper body strength whatsoever, and I do this one move my partner, who is a woman and 4’11, taught me from a self-defense class she took as a child, which is to make your hand into a duck bill and shove it in your attacker’s eyes. I do that and he falls. Or no, he doesn’t fall because what I am about to do next, I don’t want it to be cowardly. I shoot him in the knees! And he falls. The hostages all run out. I walk out. I have never run after a bus, after a train, after shit. And I don’t run away from shit either. I strut out, and I’m bloody, his blood is on me but not a lot, like a tasteful splatter, and the gun suddenly turns into an AK-47, Americans love those, and I hang it across my body like a Ms. America sash and it becomes windy and my hair blows in the wind the reporters all take my picture, which will be in the front page of all the American papers, and I look like a fuckin supermodel, but of course, foreigner etc etc, so ICE officers approach me and try to arrest me but! The white moms come speeding in their Hummers and form a barrier around me and block them, and throw little Confederate flags at me, la reina del Sur.
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Karla Cornejo Villavicencio is a writer who lives in New Haven with her partner and bad dog. She is the author of the recently published reporting/memoir hybrid THE UNDOCUMENTED AMERICANS. It is a punk manifesto