Foreign Words

Habit is

waiting for upcoming days.

Yaya-el y los caracoles

are dressed in the color

of horsehair.

Salamanca puts shackles

on Marruecos,

Mozambiqueando

without Portugallos,

because, after,

we grew a large apple on the belly button.

Oye, le aguantamos a Florida, México, California.

And we let them crush us,

and we seasoned the meat,

and picked from a truthful cherry tree.

“Speak American!”

They discrushed the seedless yellow bread,

and traded bananas for Airbnbs.

ENGLISH

FOR

FLORIDA

At that time,

with an open radioactive letter,

they destroyed the alphabet of blunderbusses

and old abandoned cannons,

there was a manifest fortune

(made of dust and the innocence

of shame).

Sino me respetan,

vamo' ablal inglé'.

We know everything kindly,

and fill with limestone our pores

because they want their version spoken

with our ancient lips,

on the paper star sterilized

with a blowtorch.

Our outdated ears get us lost

while we unreeve spaghetti

and memory is swept.

…they never listen to

the horror,

the deeds,

the macoutes laughing,

the tapeworms,

the injured,

or hope…

Therefore,

we, the “discovered”,

with extranjerismos

and carimbo

sunbathe with the gaze gone

over our dead,

motherless,

sin una madre que nos parió.

“These are the facts.”

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Yolanda Rivera Castillo was born in Añasco, a small town in Puerto Rico, a twilight city between the mountains and the sea, “mar y tierra.” Her father brought poetry into her life through his own, her mother passed on words to her to devour in haste, and her son is an accomplished poet who has made her rethink conventional ideas about aesthetics. She is a professor at the University of Puerto Rico-Río Piedras. Her publications include academic works in linguistics, two poetry books (Emergencia de la luz, Baladas de tentación y destierro), and poems in journals and anthologies.