Audio
   - The Legacy Of Bochinche
   - After Terrance Hayes & Caribbean Love
   - If Birth Be A Border


The Legacy Of Bochinche

We feed off bochinche so much we keep secrets to starve out would be enemies

This secret keeping makes even mundane occurrences into news

by the gift of their shroud of mystery

The ritual of making the masa

each daughter, tía, madre, a plátano or yuca in hand

the bowl big enough to hold hours of work

and laughter and tears

of the magia that happens when women gather

to create something beautiful in tandem

Anything unknown and doled out piecemeal

like pasteles at Christmas

must mean it juicy enough to savor

must mean recipe a lineage line

must be pass down a los hijos worthy

must be special-ingredient-to-bisabuelas-sofrito delicious

this is bochinche begetting bochinche

so al final

we all eat


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If Birth Be A Border

This line of division

Of provision

Of a life where solo hustle fed and homed

to and for myself

Selfish girl to self-sacrificing woman


You come from the space

between spaces

Where a scalpel

A tide

A world

A wall

Parted a galaxy

into a new universe

                    You are from everything

                              Stars and chaos and cosmos and divinity

                                  You are of earth and stone and dirt and bones


They have broken us from ourselves

Mejor somos, no?

Nosotros que llegarón al otro lado

De la manera correcta

En lenguas de canoa

si hubiera una forma correcta de sobrevivir

My grandmother's tongue a raft

between the sky and Cabo Rojo



Your father a stay you never swallowed

Los estados unidos a risk

he couldn’t maneuver

Your three year old eyes a last memory

Your look a lasting decree

             Don’t come for me, I’m destined to leave

                     No me persigas, quiero que me olvides

                             Dos hijos enviaron a una vida mejor


Pero la enfermedad no sabe na’ de oportunidad

y todo de Llevar

Otra vez, te van a dejar


These walls

these oceans

these papers

Build a mountain

Carve a valley

Lloramos a stream

Flourish


Brick by brick we assemble a home

of all the places we’ve come from

Of all the lands forbidden now

weave a family of our stories


Of my abuelo Leoncio

            Of your abuela Marta

           Of my bisabuela and her dozen

De mi abuela Milagro the miraculous

And her seven


We are a tapestry

A testament

A promise

The scar on the bridge between worlds


Somos el futuro

Un inmigrante enamorao

Con La nieta de un inmigrante poderoso

Nos vamo’ florecer

Vamos hacer de este mundo un Jardín

you can see for miles

O una finca que sostiene la vida

de nuestro futuro

Y con amor o odio van a ver

Todo los colores de nuestro planeta

En el mismo sitio

Libre de fronteras


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After Terrance Hayes and Caribbean love

This bedroom a land all our own
our bodies a dance of reclamation
the treasures stolen before we breathed
our love an anomaly
a tedious tie of worlds amid strings
and beings unseen
to survival of gynecologic guillotine
we a bounty amid the barren
a cacophony of moaned liberation
a revolutionary demonstration
these ships we break with but a sigh
mi cielo the shores we’ve waved to arrive
by your side
of ancestors plucked like dandelion flotsam
of shores we landed on in past lives

how we embrace each other beyond chains
how we breathe despite attempted genocide
how we kindle kindness despite unseen whiteness
Do you suppose that we are here
because we are both lonely
in some acute diasporified way?