A poem against war

And cochineal paintings

As the US continues to intensify and spread war around the world, attacking Iran yesterday, I do the basics to keep sanity and navigate fear. Today, I turn to poetry, care for my children, and look at paintings I did a few months ago.

Those creating war/ The basics

Don’t they know that life is the only thing we've got?

Don’t they know that peace can’t be created with war?

Don’t they know it takes a lot of work to be alive?

Don’t they know they could be creating something else?

Let them learn to plant food

Let them learn to sew and dress themselves up

Let them learn to breathe until air reaches their elbows

Let them learn the right thing to do with their feces

I wish I could look deep into their eyes

See if my soul can touch theirs in any way

They light up the skies as if there are no consequences

Even the seals look up to the stars to find their way

I hear she stayed in an empty building

After the warnings that the bombs would come

Empty street and empty neighborhood

Because who would water the plants?

I learned about cochineal recently; it is a natural material that opens up a wealth of knowledge about indigenous, colonial, and ongoing history. I had access to some of it at a workshop with master Zapotec weaver José Buenaventura Gonzalez Guitierrez at the Soil Factory. José let me take the workshop leftovers home, and I used them to dye raw cotton canvas and mixed some with glue to create a paint that would fix on paper. The paintings were done in Arches watercolor paper, preserving the original cochineal color, while the text was written on an acidic paper panel, darkening the cochineal to brown. I did a series of 12 cochineal paintings on paper under the sun, and I’m using the canvases for other paintings over time.