Explore Poems & Poets

Alabanza. Praise the cook with a shaven head / and a tattoo on his shoulder that said Oye, / a blue-eyed Puerto Rican with people from Fajardo, / the harbor of pirates centuries ago.

My father used to leave sharp sounds / By the door, steady conga heads were / Rare / When you party with grown-ups, / You learn not to suffer dancers a weak / Hand;

In Estonia, Indrek is taking his children / to the Dollar Market to look at bananas. / He wants them to know about the presence of fruit, / about globes of light tart to the tongue,

Como tú, I question history’s blur in my eyes / each time I face a mirror. Like a mirror, I gaze / into my palm a wrinkled map I still can’t read, / my lifeline an unnamed road I can’t find, can’t / trace back to the fork in my parents’ trek / that cradled me here.

It’s when they see me naked that they finally believe / I’m from Panamá. The crucifix / hanging on my Black chest, underneath / the little hair I inherited from my father, / sweats as I perform what priests / and their laws call unnatural acts.

He paces the cool, dusty classroom, / hands in his pockets, rows of chairs, / sixth-grade children looking straight / at him, watching his big-band walk.

At the greyhound bus stations, at airports, at silent wharfs / the bodies exit the crafts. Women, men, children; cast out / from the new paradise.

in a Tex-Mex restaurant. His co-workers, / unable to utter his name, renamed him Jalapeño.

every tree / a brother / every hill / a pyramid / a holy spot

They say La Ciguapa was born on the peak of El Pico / Duarte. / Balled up for centuries beneath the rocks / she sprang out red, covered in boils, dried off black / and the first thing she smelled was her burning hair.

my parents are Mexican who are not / to be confused with Mexican Americans / or Chicanos. i am a Chicano from Chicago / which means i am a Mexican American / with a fancy college degree & a few tattoos.

Sitting at her table, she serves / the sopa de arroz to me / instinctively, and I watch her, / the absolute mamá, and eat words / I might have had to say more out of embarrassment.

A hurricane destroyed your sense of home / El huracán arrasa lo que amas. / and all you wanted was to pack your bags / Quieres viajar de noche, sin manera, / in dead of night, still waving mental flags, / sin maletas, izar mental bandera. / forgetting the nation is a syndrome.

The day begins like any other day. / Your daughter soaks a second diaper, / chortles as she shoves her soft-cooked egg / to the floor.

Put attention, grandma would say, as if attention / were a packet of salt to be sprinkled, or a mound / we could scoop out of a carton like ice cream.

Crickets, coquis corrobórate. Mezzo. / Alto. Tenor. Chemical coladas are pumped / like stale petroleum from fracked rocks. / The joy of combustion at five dollars a pop.

black the raven, black the dapples on the moon & horses, / black sleep of night & the night’s idea, / black the piano, white its teeth but black its gums & mind / with which we serenade the black maria.

It was the night / before the welfare check / and everybody sat around the table / hungry heartbroken cold confused / and unable to heal the wounds / on the dead calendar of our eyes

Enough of osseous and chickadee and sunflower / and snowshoes, maple and seeds, samara and shoot, / enough chiaroscuro, enough of thus and prophecy / and the stoic farmer and faith and our father and tis / of thee

There it is, the long prow / of the Caribbean, charging to break / the map’s complexion. / It is a key, a crocodile, a hook, / an uncoiling question, / a stretch of sinews catching / dribbles from the continent / under which it will, forever, float.

So now we are equals, verdad? All along eyeing the same / banks, / as though we might surface on the same shore, bare backs / to the sun, wet shirts in hand, boots aside,

ink for this poem about leaving an island / old Tonton Macoutes fools mediocre sky / new Tonton Macoutes / nothing to eat / not even a single sun tree or mangrove in combite.

Going down Highway 99, to Modesto, / I see an orange glow in the sky. / At first I think it is a fire, but, as I get closer, / it is the lights of a packinghouse, / where women work through the night, / giving up the fire of their lives, / to get the peaches to market.

In the beginning, light was shaved from its cob, / white kernels divided from dark ones, put to the pestle / until each sparked like a star.

Lyre and voice / the ancient serenade / Strings right below myth. / A circle of naked flesh / from the pores comes / the a capella of the Greek / chorus, the Taino Areyto flute / in the dance.

un beso / es una puerta / que se abre / un secreto