 I'm just a little piece of a big... You're about to get ideas. When you start thinking about stuff, ideas... Sometimes, thinking about all that stuff is hard. I'm 27 years old, and I am finally enough. I am fluent in Spanish, and have helped move mountains fighting for LGBT and women's rights. I am a leading actress in a play Tony Award, and hold a BA with a double major in women's studies and theater. I do not have children. From growling, or folks from dying, and though she tries, she can absorb pain. But mama, she's got her own way. Her own way of being strong for you, but then crumbling within herself. Wiping your tears. But crying herself, mama's got a gift in that. Being what you need her to be. But who's got what mama needs? Who adapts for mama? Who's mama's savior? Nobody knows. But mama, she got a gift in that too. Proper herself, huh? At least for others to see what art in a place called home. Until the earth is rocked and shattered, and the world and the machine and the man send us flying in a million different directions. Like ashes of people and memories. The wind blowing us into the eyes and ears and mouths of the real people. Nobody wants to eat dust. Dust doesn't belong in the air at all. We were never born to travel. It used to be green here. Pockets used to be green here. Now even the grass shows no color. When the crops dried, hope went with it. My land, this land isn't mine to claim, but it sure feels like it. This soil knows of my footprints. This house was built from my sweat. This property feels like mine, but how come it ain't? The dust just picked us up and blew us toward California. So we went. I'm losing my home. Not a building that I slept, but a home. I grew up in this place. I lived in this place. Memories are buried so deep in these walls. If you tried picking them up, they'd probably weigh a thousand pounds apiece. I remember all the way to California, dreaming of what I thought it would be. I imagined beautiful green pastures and lots of water. When I get to California, I want lots of friends. I want to go swimming and play hot scotch with them. I want to go to school. I want to read lots of books and draw tons of pictures. I want a big house that smells of good food, cooking, and being a big living room with my whole family. I want money so I can buy candy or a soda. I want fresh fruit. I want to build a cool sweet juice drip down from my chin. I want grapes, oranges, tomatoes, everything. I want to be a housewife. I don't want to work in those fields. I just want my family to be happy. Whether I'm nobody or I'm a nation, like the stalactites that crawl into their crystal helix shapes, I crawl, the American baby, from the Strait of Magellan where the fish gargle their lugubrious songs to the dehydrated line where the Texans close American wannabes to plunge their broken Spanish at me. I cross the frontier. And for a while I stay with the print pickers, developing into a character that cannot be defined by American citizenship. My hair crawled away from its scalp. My feet, they forgot to ask sex dances. Memories became like packaged boxes of an attic of a house to busy to care. The melanin in my skin disgusted. They didn't mean marriage. I wanted to dream, baby. So when they told me about visas, I listened. And soon enough I began speaking from my nose, just like the gringos. I recited the stories of Bush and Cheney so they gave me my green card, but I forgot about my mother who scarred back at the spine of the Andes who incubated me in the smoke of a patient volcano for two centuries. I didn't remember myself until the age of 17 when, burned out from singing Yankee Doodle, I recalled the tunes of my own people, the heats and smells of Acapulco, the poverty and the richness of the tongue. And I had also forgotten the cacao that is in the eyes of sweet-faced strangers. It all came back to me. I am an American baby, but the U.S., my friend, is not America. Dear Tom Jove, wherever injustice anywhere is taken as a threat and then acted upon, everywhere, I'll be there. Dear Tom, I'll be the mirror that everyone can look into and say, I am happy with my body, with my sexuality, with my strengths, with my flaws, with my scars. I am happy with who I am. Dear Tom, I'll be there in a world where Martin Luther King's dream is no longer a dream, where poverty is a word only to describe the past. Dear Tom, I'll be wherever there is no laughter. I'll help bring kindness and joy and a little forgiveness. Dear Tom Jove, I understand you've been wandering around this beautiful land of ours like a graveyard ghost. You're fighting for us in silence, but you're screaming too. Our world today needs some help. There's so much yelling, screaming, and cursing, and I don't understand why. Dear Tom Jove, I believe that people need to realize that we are not better than one another. Black, white, gay, straight. What does a title matter? We all need one another. Dear Tom, all that matters is that I know the truth and that you know the truth. Dear Tom Jove, I am no longer going to sit on the sidelines of my country and hope for a better tomorrow. When Hillary Clinton is elected president, I will be there. I will be knocking on doors. I will be changing lives and putting the message out there. Dear Tom, I'm writing to inform you that I have decided to stand up for what I believe in. I want to be a part of the rebuilding of America. So if you come looking for me, text me when you're on your way. Yes, Tom, text. We need to enter the 21st century.