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.