By Elidio La Torre Lagares
la casa
scar of stone
undaunted
fenced out
solitary
the grass is alive
undying Autumnal green
Flamboyán Trees weave soft
breeze that shrouds
the foundations of that first house
Juan Ponce de Leon named Villa Caparra after
the great city of the Roman Empire in Spain
to name the thing is to kill it: then it’s alive
Caparra turned silent monument facing
an arterial road deafened by bleed speed
traffic unaware of the ruins
invisible museum
invisibility is a thing with scales
this is not Ithaca
this is Borikén
and the house dwells beyond façade
intimate space unity complexity
furnished with dispersed images
a broken body
a house is the logos of home for imagination augments
the values of reality
The Caparra Archeological Site settles memory
timid and without elasticity in a land where
the fictions drown the passing of time
oblivion is kingdom
come Ponce de Leon’s house has no ceiling
or walls today
it’s the house of nothing
la casa de nada
post-Caliban blues
I wish I could have a better story
for the sky so they would listen to me
in stone morn splendid
heroics cohere beautiful exact
painful
like the first burn of love
in the trembling
dark skin
shoot ornate denunciations and mystic
reggaeton chants varnished in tangerine
sunsets
tarnished oblivions dry-mouths
and guilt blood made of bloods
and wars fought for Sam
equality smirks because
it only happens when we die
and we die all the
time, but they never
tell us
equal but
separate Jim
Chango laws
we are moths flying into
the blue light of history
you see my own death comes with
a dirge funeral wreaths white hearse
with freckles
just like my mother’s face
we’re all erasure bandying melancholic
sushi down the gentrified misereres
of third world regrets and pachanga*
ad-lib
as selling cheap watches to Father Time
on Easter Sunday Missa Luba
(I drowned that Missa Luba)
we’re so backdoor Bacardi
pharmakon with bula drums and timba
sounds from forests catching fire
we might not find the way back
to greater it was better when it was
lonely
it’s always lonely
we’re so jornalero notebooks my ancestors carried
in their hearts a graveyard shift dead ringing
in splendid
isolation of starlit
clots
we’re so the loneliness of hot iron black codes that still
pervade the lack of freedom we’re an island
built on servitude
I’m so asylum
displacement we’re so IRA so ire so irie
with this self-governing piece of land
we even write our own constitutions
while Uncle provides financial aid for infrastructure
we are no commonwealth
we are a Latino reservation
a dying country paints the shadow
of a dying mother
m
o
t
h
e
r
m
o
t
h
e
r
p
l
e
a
s
e
swarm fireflies from your mouth
I clutch my nails to the bottom of the sky
feed me a name before I forget what I will
be
*Caribbean rhythm that blends son montuno (Cuba) and merengue (Dominican Republic).
Elidio La Torre Lagares is a Puerto Rican writer. Nominated for a Pushcart Prize, he currently teaches literature and creative writing in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Puerto Rico. La Torre earned his MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Texas-El Paso. He has published several poetry collections in Spanish, including Vicios de construcción (Construction Vices) and Ensayo del vuelo (Flight Rehearsal), which was awarded the Julia de Burgos National Poetry Award 2008 in Puerto Rico. La Torre’s first two novels, Historia de un dios pequeño (Tale of a Small God, 2001) and Gracia (Grace, 2004), were recognized by the Puerto Rico Pen Club Chapter as one the best books published in their respective years. His more recent novel, Correr tras el viento (Chasing the wind), was successfully released as an e-book late in 2010, ranking number 4 among Amazon Kindle’s best selling list for thrillers/ mystery in Spanish. It has been hailed since then as one of the groundbreaking Caribbean novels of the 21rst century. La Torre’s poetry and fiction have appeared in Revista Centro Journal (City University of New York), Azahares (University of Arkansas-Fort-Smith), Sargasso (University of Puerto Rico), The Acentos Review, Nagari, Malpais Review, Ariel Chart, Ink & Nebula, and The American Poetry Journal.