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  You could have a big dipper   

I’m following Rachel Zucker on Twitter now by Guillermo Rebollo-Gil






I’m following Rachel Zucker on Twitter now


That’s the poem. Also, this: I once copied a line

from Martín Espada on a Mother’s Day card,

“the best she was was her children.” I found it pretty

much summed up who or what my mother was.

But, really, it’s like I was celebrating how she

had been erased from her own life or how

I had become the only unerasable part of herself.

I am, after all, her only child. And this is far from

the worst I’ve ever been. Though it’s no fault

of her own. She raised me good.


I’m following Rachel Zucker on Twitter now


And I’m sinking. A friend of a friend invites me for coffee,

wants to discuss “the figure of the ally in the economy

of guilt.” He is back in his home country, he writes.

For me it’s just home—where the guilt is. So, I put off

replying until it’s time for him to return to his better-than-

home country, where good coffee may be scarce,

but the people excel at getting back to you in time. I wonder,

as I rush into my son’s darkened room, what am I an ally to?

Despair, as an answer, is frighteningly close to disappear.


I’m following Rachel Zucker on Twitter now


And this is what the birds sound like—

someone slowly pouring in the sand

for a sandlot suddenly falls over and it

feels like something somebody else would

refer to as a scandal. I am doing my best

to describe just what is going on here,

his mother would ask if she were to awaken

now, before dawn, to find me sitting

with my back against the boy’s door,

looking terribly like a boy myself.




 

Guillermo Rebollo Gil (San Juan, 1979) is a poet, sociologist and attorney. His poems have appeared, or are forthcoming, in Fence, Feed, Mandorla, Spry, Trampset, Trampoline, FreezeRay and Anti-Heroin Chic. His book-length essay Writing Puerto Rico: Our Decolonial Moment (2018), a careful consideration of the potentialities of radical thought and action in contemporary Puerto Rico, was published by Palgrave Macmillan in their New Caribbean Studies Series. He belongs to/with Lucas Imar and Ariadna Michelle. Happily so.

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