By AIDEED MEDINA 

White women give my father shaded looks.
Bringing babies to do their dirty work,
mumbled in passing.
 
I am paid in jelly doughnuts
for my day on the boycott.
 
My dad leads my baby brother
to the front of the grocery store doors
for a meeting with the manager:
two men
and a five-year-old interpreter.

By AIDEED MEDINA 

Es de madrugada.
 
It is dawn          always dawn
      the sun breaking through
             the breaking of the soil.
 
The faint smell of rain from irrigated dirt
crusts of mud from the crop rows
comes home with my father
on his pants and beneath his fingernails.

By AIDEED MEDINA

There is no time to complain,
only time to move as fast as you can
through the rows of low-lying shrubs,
the tall stalks.
The people of the fields leave
the complaining to the rest of us,
driving by on our way to work,
school,
the gym.