4,645+

By MARÍA LUISA ARROYO CRUZADO
June 2018

Ten months ago, rich Puerto Ricans & tourists had the means
to flee first after the hurricane. What about the average María y José?

Where are the names of the dead to make them more human?
Why do the deaths of these U.S. citizens matter less?

Where are the bodies of our loved ones? Who has held novenas
for their waterlogged spirits to ascend?

How will we claim them?  How will the ink dry on death certificates?

What is the current equivalency rate? One mainland Caucasian
= how many island Puerto Ricans? Dead or alive?

What are the Puerto Rican Spanish words for aftermath?
Disaster capitalism? Intentional erasure of a modern colony?

 

María Luisa Arroyo Cruzado was educated at Colby (BA), Tufts (MA), and Harvard (ABD) in German, her third language. She has one full-length collection of poems, Gathering Words / Recogiendo Palabras, and two chapbooks, Flight and Destierro Means More than Exile. Arroyo’s community-based workshops garnered her recognition, including being named the inaugural Poet Laureate of Springfield, Massachusetts (2014-2016), and a 2016 New England Public Radio Arts & Humanities Award recipient. In July 2015, Arroyo earned an MFA in creative writing from Solstice at Pine Manor College. She is an assistant professor of writing and first-year studies at Bay Path University.

[Purchase Issue 16 here.]

4,645+

Related Posts

Glass: Five Sonnets

MONIKA CASSEL
In ’87 I see guardsmen walk their AK-47s / on the platforms. The trains slow down but never stop. I think, / my mother was born in such a different Germany, but this is true for everyone / —so why can’t I stop looking?

cover of "Civilians"

On Civilians: Victoria Kelly Interviews Jehanne Dubrow

JEHANNE DUBROW
Now we live in North Texas, hours away from the nearest shore. And yet, the massive amounts of open space—all the prairie, marsh, and plains that we have here—started to feel like another kind of vast water, another great expanse of distance and isolation.

Lizard perched on a piece of wood.

Poems in Tutunakú and Spanish by Cruz Alejandra Lucas Juárez

CRUZ ALEJANDRA LUCAS JUÁREZ
Before learning to walk / and before I’d fallen upon the wet earth / already my heart hummed in three tones. / Even when my steps were still clumsy, / I already held three consciousnesses. // Long before my baptism, / already my three nahuals were running