Lunática
They say I inherited the moon
in all the wrong ways—
not soft, not silver,
not saintly.
They say I bruise the night
just by speaking.
When I was a girl, they warned me:
no seas lunática,
as if the word were a diagnosis,
as if my mother’s mother’s mother
had not been called the same
for daring to look skyward
when she was told to pray.
My family learned early
to fear anything that glowed in the dark.
Women especially.
Women most of all.
A woman with too much light
is a danger,
a question,
a curse.
I was taught to worship only one mother—
the pale one nailed to the wall,
the one who forgives everything
except disobedience.
But I felt another mother calling me,
a softer voice behind the veil:
Killa Mama,
luna de mis huesos,
madre plateada
que conoció mi nombre
antes de que yo pudiera orarlo.
I know her by the way
my body ebbs and flows,
how my moods pull the ocean tight,
how my rage grows round and full
despite the shrinking
they demanded of me.
If madness lives in me,
it is an inheritance
older than Peru,
older than Spain,
older than the silence stitched
into my mother’s throat.
Call me lunática—
I am done pretending it wounds me.
The moon has phases
and so do I.
Some nights I vanish.
Some nights I return
so bright the whole sky
can’t look away.
They say lunáticas
are dangerous.
They are right.
A woman who remembers
the goddess in her
cannot be domesticated.
A woman who answers
Killa Mama’s call
cannot be caged.
This is how I honor
the women before me—
not by shrinking,
but by shining
exactly as we were taught
not to.
So call me lunática,
pero escucha bien:
I am the daughter of moonlight,
the descendant of women
too luminous for the world
that tried to dim them.
I rise anyway.
I glow anyway.
I name myself anyway.
Lunática—
porque la luna
siempre regresa.
