Hurricanes Irma & María in Puerto Rico

BY MARÍA LUISA ARROYO CRUZADO

Born near the Cape Verde Islands, Hurricane Irma swished
her skirts of winds & rain, toyed with Puerto Rico,
stole light from 1,000,000 Puerto Ricans, her eye
on Florida. Some say she roared past like a train 
that descended from the skies. Weeks later,
María stole light from 3,000,000 more, stripped trees
of their green, birds of their breath & feathers, roofs
of their means to shelter. Some say she screamed
like a sea of women being buried alive in water.

 

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.]

Hurricanes Irma & María in Puerto Rico

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