Outside the grocery store laden with the sweat of tanned field workers we stand little girls in winter coats our hands hold signs leaflets our dark long hair waist length one straight, one curly we say to the people who walk up to the glass door don’t buy the lettuce here— they aren’t good to their workers I don’t recall anyone said anything back or who stood with us I remember my sister next to me, us in our Sunday velvet best she beret and red plaid jacket me white rabbit skin muff little brown girls with picket signs rosy cheeks, big black eyes legions of ghosts above behind angels wing over us ancestor feathers beat in the invisible breeze each time someone enters or exits the building— with a bag full of groceries oranges and eggs celery and grapes.
This is one of my earliest memories and in many ways made me who I am today as a poet and human being. This is also one of my current favorite poems and I was so pleased to have it appear nationally on Poem-A-Day. Last weekend, I led a poetry workshop for teens for Write On, Door County’s first Youth Writers Conference in Sturgeon Bay, and the prompt was write your first, or one of your earliest memories. It feels appropriate to start here with this poem.
Angie Trudell Vasquez is the current poet laureate of Madison, Wisconsin (2020-2024). She holds an MFA in poetry from the Institute of American Indian Arts. Finishing Line Press published her collections, In Light, Always Light, in May 2019, and My People Redux, in January 2022. In 2021, she attended the Macondo Writers Workshop started by Sandra Cisneros, and became a fellow, also known as a Macondista. She co-edited the anthology, Through This Door: Wisconsin in Poems, with Margeret Rozga in 2020, and released it through her small press Art Night Books.
