On the phone, my father tells a story
of my great-grandmother’s sister,
how she could read your spirit in cigar smoke
and I imagine her lip curl to suck in breath,
then wrap of sun-cracked pucker around tight leaves,
to blow through packed tobacco,
onto parishioner faces and push the astral out
to be seen, and I think, though I did not know her,
some remnant must persist. How to conjure nearly 5000,
what herbs and smoke must rise to see them
among split trees, the flopping blue tents,
the black mold mounding to its own glory.
And what of we who scatter, flamboyán seeds,
defiantly burning our own blooming for beauty?
We must offer our smoldering through burnt red and gold, rush
into the ether to throng our people massacred
by lack: lack of the electric to run respirators,
lack of milk to flush babes to heavy mango sweetness,
lack of clean water to echo our clean amidst the dirty politic.
They. Will. Rise.
And we will rise together,
twine through silver moss and side-winding ceiba.
I am calling them. We call them.
What was split by wind and hurl rain,
all of it stitches its wounds,
made stronger like callouses on fractured bones,
summoning collagen body gold.
We will wear smoke and dark night to fuel our guerrilla tactics,
defend nuestra isla from the invasion that comes.
These are columbuses who use the same tactics as against
the Taínos, kill us with disease, this time as capitalism, debt, the lack,
to steal land for their leisure. How the devil delights in playing on our bones.
We call them, call the bones to rise and shake,
exchange uselessly flung towels for dagger hauntings.
The devil does not know the danger the living can do
riding a tidal wave of spirit.
We all know how to summon,
starting with our own. Nearly 5000 gone and not gone
and we are millions marching machetero.
Siempre, siempre pa’lante.
Nothing will stop our rising from shards and ash. Nada.”
The coquís are already singing.
Contributor Notes
Raina J. León, PhD is Black, Afro-Boricua, and from Philadelphia. She believes in collective action and community work, the profound power of holding space for the telling of our stories, and the liberatory practice of humanizing education. A poet and writer, she is the author of Canticle of Idols, Boogeyman Dawn, sombra : (dis)locate and the chapbooks, profeta without refuge and Areyto to Atabey: Essays on the Mother(ing) Self. She has received fellowships and residencies with Cave Canem, The Obsidian Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, among others. She is a member of the SF Writers Grotto and the Carolina African American Writers Collective. She also is a founding editor of The Acentos Review, an online quarterly, international journal devoted to the promotion and publication of Latinx arts, which has published over 900 Latinx voices in its history. She educates current and future agitators/educators as a full professor of education and frequent guest speaker nationwide. She is an emerging visual artist and digital archivist, particularly with StoryJoy, which she co-founded with her mother, Dr. Norma Thomas. She is the lead coordinator for Nomadic Press in Philadelphia and a senior researcher on various grants in education and literature. You can find her on all the platforms @rainaleon.
Photo credit: Matteo Monchiero
