Prospective Titles for a Puerto Rican Syllabus
—for Yarimar Bonilla and Marisol LeBrón
Puerto Rico as Beheaded Saint of Astonishment
Puerto Rico as New World Apocrypha
Puerto Rico as Plebiscite on Accursed Indemnities
Puerto Rico as Namesake to an Artifactual Piracy
Puerto Rico as Bootstraps Tethered to a Sunken Chiringa
Puerto Rico as Sanctuary to Unexploded Ordnance
Puerto Rico as Psalms Spoken in the Tongues of Fictitious Capital
Puerto Rico as Me Quito o No Me Quito
Puerto Rico as Black Flag Emptied of Peculiar Majesties
Puerto Rico as Our Lady of Perpetual Syndromes
Puerto Rico as #Renuncia
Puerto Rico as Patois Cupidity for a People’s Assembly
Puerto Rico as Bioluminescent Theses for a Livable Future
Sycorax: an inquiry
—for Michelle Cliff
is a sinking raft still a raft this world a wordless stone or is it orphic riot & anthem bewitched
cold waters & wounded innocence and does grito mean cry as in sins immaculate &
blameless façade or is an isle just an isle moon eclipsed zombies on the prowl no speech
only noise sinister noise but then how do you spell liturgy of a lost tribe ceremony of a
contagious melancholia and i, a breeder am dark devil & tamed bruja am boundless vendetta
& chora marooned and so what shall i cry if not thunderous rain stagnant pond twisted root
blinded night i see thee everywhere!
Don Pedro’s Prayer*
ask the stone
what it was like
to be the cell
then ask the cell
who it loved
or why
it bothered
with love
when so many
ashes
still
smolder.
[*] Pedro Albizu Campos (1891–1965) was imprisoned twenty-six years for his Puerto Rico Libre advocacy. He left prison in a body wrought by radiation-induced lesions and sickness. His FBI dossier numbered more than twenty thousand pages.
Born in Puerto Rico and raised in southern Florida, Éric Morales-Franceschini is a former day laborer, US Army veteran, and community college grad who now holds a PhD from University of California, Berkeley and is assistant professor of English and Latin American studies at the University of Georgia. He is author of the chapbook Autopsy of a Fall (Newfound, 2021), winner of the 2020 Gloria Anzaldúa Poetry Prize, and of the scholarly book The Epic of Cuba Libre: The Mambí, Mythopoetics, and Liberation (University of Virginia Press, 2022). His poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared in Global South Studies, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Moko Magazine, Acentos Review, Kweli, Witness Magazine, the Boston Review, Small Axe, and elsewhere.