As Us

A Space for Writers of the World

CJ Sounds—Poetry

I Am Not

I am not my skin, my eyes, or my hair. Your box will not define me.

No soy mi Español, y no puedes decirme porque jamas caminado en Mexíco, que no soy

Mexicano.

I am not my father in jail, and I am not doomed to repeat the same cycle.

Je ne suis pas mon Vietamien, et je ne devrais pas que j’ai appris Francais car je veux, pas parce

que je veux dire avec mon famille.

I am not the fact that I don’t know Thai or Chinese very well, and you will never tell me that I

am not “ ____” enough.

I am who I am

I am not your labels

You will not change define me.

CJ Sounds is a gay Asian/Latino Barrio Writer living in Austin, TX who has been three years through the program at University of Texas with García. A recent graduate of Lanier HS, where some of the other Austin Barrio Writers are from, he is attending Texas A&M University – Corpus Christi in the fall and will be assisting the Barrio Writers program in CC, as well as pursuing a dual major in Biochemistry & Linguistics. He has been published in two of the Barrio Writers anthologies as well as featured in The Daily Texan, where he was asked to elaborate on what the Barrio Writers program is and how it improves the lives of youth. In his free time, CJ works on his book and various poems, dilutes Asian stereotypes, and/or eats sushi. His works aren’t published anywhere yet, but as soon as he’s ready, he’s hoping that García and Barrio Writers will be his resource when he needs one.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

Information

This entry was posted on September 17, 2017 by .

Countdown to Launch

Issue 3February 14, 2014
Online version of Issue 3 goes live!

Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 505 other subscribers
%d bloggers like this: