By Valeria Ruiz
11th grade | Woodburn High School | Oregon
Finalist, Human Rights category
With lines from “Silenced Crimes: Hate Speech and Hate Crimes Against LGBTI People in the Peruvian Amazon (Spanish)" by Elizabeth Salazar and Marco Garro, a Pulitzer Center reporting project
I pray God for justice
The same God you ask for
a better world in which we don’t exist
I beg him to protect my girls every day
y le doy gracias por mis buenas amigas.
In the 80s we ran
We cut our hair, buried our dresses,
wiped the color from our cheeks
so they wouldn’t recognize us in the streets.
Cuídense como puedan
nos volveremos a encontrar,
o de repente no,
quién sabe qué pasará
They chased my sisters, dragged them from bars,
tied them with rope and threw them into Ucayali.
The state does not count them.
The city forgets their names.
But La Lupuna remembers.
El árbol “La Lupuna,”
Giant of the green Amazonia,
Él, who I once was
La, who I am now
my roots tangled with the bones of my girls.
La Lupuna
A trans woman whose branches are broken,
whose forest burns
The fire does not start in the trees,
but in the mouths of men
politicians and preachers
who say we are the ones to blame.
The wound bleeds
but the murderers don’t need masks anymore.
They chase me, like they chased my girls
when they cut throats so we wouldn’t speak,
when they threw them into Ucayali
so the current would carry away the truth.
But covering a wound does not heal it
it only makes it deeper.
I take my scissors and cut.
¿Quién no tiene miedo a morir?
Better to lose my hair than my life.
Better to erase the “a” at the end of my name
before they erase me first.
And when I am gone,
they will bury me under a stranger’s name,
place the wrong picture on my grave,
rewrite my story as if I was never here.
Invisible to the state
en vida y en muerte
The same message carved in my wood
“Aquí no las queremos”
But La Lupuna still stands.
Her roots remember.
Her branches whisper the names they tried to erase.
I am Vicky, Pilar, Andrea, Reyna y más.
They tried to bury us beneath false names,
but we bloom in the cracks,
we rise where the earth splits open.
One day, the forest will heal.
One day, they will speak our names
and when the sky turns soft again,
When Ucayali, the river of blood flows
we will walk among the trees,
unafraid.
I am a Nicaraguan immigrant who recently graduated from high school in Woodburn, Oregon. I wrote this poem because, as a straight woman who grew up in Latin America, I witnessed firsthand the discrimination faced by the LGBTQ+ community, especially trans individuals. Because of my privilege, I feel a responsibility to use my voice to honor those who have been lost to violence and oppression, and to advocate for justice and visibility, especially among a community that even nowadays continues to be targeted.
Read more winning entries from the 2025 Fighting Words Poetry Contest.