White = Normal?
Companies
High from mercury –
Spreading poison –
Telling women
Being White
Would make them look
Beautiful.
They
Scrape away money and lives;
Corporations—the ivory foundation of colonization.
Whiteness
Radiates down
On the lovely Filipina,
Scraping Her beauty away
To become a pale imitation
Of White Beauty.
Am I Beautiful?
I distinctly remember watching Barbie movies when I was five,
And wishing that I had blonde hair and blue eyes.
In my earliest memories,
Around me
Was a reflection of my father’s white-ness.
Only my mom
Was a pool of brown.
Until I was 14 in the high school play,
I never learned how to use makeup.
The one thing that
Everyone remembered of me
And my souvenir of the production,
My Paper Plate Award,
Was a reflection of my beauty
With makeup on.
My sister
(the rebel)
Learned how to use makeup
Before I did.
Her skin was worse than mine when I was 13
And now
Is better than mine is at 20.
Ads upon ads
Flood my eye
Telling me how to be
Revealing
My own inner beauty
As if my inner beauty
Was barely enough
For my own vanity.