Photo Tale: Free Spirits

Free Spirits

Writer/Model: Jessica Reidy
Photographer: Christine Stoddard
QuailBellMagazine.com

I'm on fire-- like the smoldering gypsy
from paperback novels-- that dusky
maiden in a gold corset who twirls, stamps,
and fucks like a fox, outdoors, all fours,
without Christian modesty. That fiction.
I'm the Romani girl who burns to death
in her bed when Fascists bomb her settlement
shouting, Burn, fucking gypsies!

Maybe it will be in the papers-- a short, ambiguous piece.
Vogue could feature the targeted girls, surviving, swathed three layers
of skirts, blue cotton, yellow cotton, green,
long and heavy to trap their purity, swaying
as they dodge rocks hurled in the streets.

No. Really, it's a fashion shoot. A white super model
exposes her hard, pale belly, wears a red silk Prada scarf
as a shirt. Pink and orange crinoline, glints of gold
hoop earrings, tousled braids--
“Gypsy spirit,” the caption notes.
The Swedish model dances barefoot in a circle
and shakes her tambourine
but no one strikes a match and turns
her steps to ash with gasoline.

I think about the long river of Romani 
in my blood, devoured. I think about the cost of “Gypsy,”
not the price tag in fashion rags for whatever fantasy they’re selling--
the coins: banned, segregated, lynched, disfigured clatter in our palms.

I wear the green glass beads my grandmother gave me. 
When I wanted to dress my heritage, and I was warned. I was told 
about the German ovens, The Great Devouring that yawned
and swallowed half of Europe’s Gypsies, six million Jews, and 
the remaining undesired. 

I have been pestilence. I have a locust for a heart.
And I can’t help but feel a thrill when a vintage dress
looks like a new spin on my old blood, looks “American Romani.”
An Indian vest, sewn with mirrors, reminds me that’s where
my river began, in the North, with a war, The Great Migration.
I want to celebrate the cloth. I want to wear it 
and unsuffer every step.
That’s not how it works. The camps still burn. 
The cloth will burn.
The 16-spoke wagon wheel, the chakra that throws
us forward, is inked on my calf. (Good Romani girls cover their legs.)
I am an amalgam, white skin and fire both, and can’t be held 
responsible for what I didn’t do.

Flame by flame, the Roma are freed--
Opre Roma. Roma, rise up. 
We are the firewood, the sea, we are the salt
and sand, cloth, coin, and cards--
we are none and all of those things; we are smoke, spark, and flint
we take the fire by the mouthful, 
I take my locust by the heartful: I am dressed in red. 

#Unreal #RomaniHeritage #RomaniPride #RealRomani #RomaniAncestry #EthnicIdentity #Poetry #ThisIsWhoIAm
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