Volcanic Vigils
My father went whole and alone before / I carried the parts of my mother
ekphrastic under a bombed-out sky
I can’t abide happy art, not when the air hanging over my people is smoke-dusted, bomb-clouded, gray with phosphorus & miasmic with rot.
A Funeral Within My Soul
Think of how I dodged death before,/ but death is a persistent player/ never losing in hide-and-seek.
AFTER WE WATCH ROAD FOOD I CONSIDER PLACE
There are so many lives I have not let myself live, restless, paradoxical, tripping instead into the imaginations of others. Corrupted. Cruel. I wonder about the life stolen from me. Would I love what I love if I loved it from Palestine?
The Anti-Poetry of Salvador Villanueva
I found Villanueva to be ahead of his time, working a craft that would be called “meta-modern” by some, an innovative style in which the reader participates in the process of the author’s work. I was immediately taken by its apparent simplicity, which caused his work to stand apart from most of the poetry I knew from my island. I would later find out that he was ahead of his time in the art of letters in Puerto Rico.
Place[meant]: Denise Low
Place[meant] is a recurring series that explores identity beyond the geopolitical and physical parameters that have come to define our sense of place. From a train in Queens to the... Read More