uprooted
Anjanette Delgado, Puerto Rico
23 September 2021
The Enemy
I was born in a war-torn wasteland, women nothing but scars with eyes, beautiful bomb craters brains half-blown out, their wounds their proof that men are the enemy.
My grandmother lost her mind after her man left, pain taught her to neglect, her only daughter, my mother, pain taught my grandmother, to hurt, to stare at doors, and stubbornly wait for the return of her enemy.
All her life—Aunt Carmen loved a lover who loved his wife, who forbade her rival black eyes from his funeral as if she—not death—were her enemy.
And then my mother, such a fool—signed up for the fight with open eyes and sacrifice, to marry the musician who still knuckle-paints blackberries on her back—as if she, not his hate, were the enemy.
It stops with me, despite my shell-shocked life, around my hips a tattered white flag: Anja, last in a family of women without men, my service to this war deferred. I will not be my own enemy.
American Juan
White Boy thinks he wants me. Overheard,
someone else’s E! Hollywood Bedtime Story:
“Puerto Rican Women and the Things They Do With Their Plump
Pillow Lips,” thinks we’re all made of J-Lo, Jennys from the block
who’ve been around the block, says, Hey. Hey, hey! Hold on,
stay still, now. How ‘bout it, honey?
I could kiss my dirty dreams clean
on the sides of your fingers, play
the inside of your thighs like a harmonica,
find out what I weigh on
the scales of your justice.
I lose it then and laaaaaaaaaaugh.
Oh, my God, I laugh, say Ay Dios Mio, Boy,
you’ve been reading some strange comic books,
buying barrio bullshit myth by the dollar
at the 37th Avenue Flea Market.
He gets it. Steps back, drops his act
long enough to flash those white, red and blue
marbles, says I’m weird, places my arms around
his back, permission to scratch, buries his nose in my
hair like a Juan with a plan
to spend a season, learn to hang on to me.
America
He was an American, always wanting
her to remember where she’d come from, told her,
in America, ideas, even ideals, could sometimes burden
with their “brought to you by” possibilities.
He was so tired, he’d say, crumpled on the couch
after the news, he’d rub his eyes, wonder how
metaphors of crime could stab so hard, the sound
was poetry. She didn’t understand. Not really. Her English
was so new, she sometimes heard the crime was her
and felt afraid, and mad, could only laugh at his “America
101” attempts. At how he could not see
how hard she tried to learn, to be, another way.
But how time flies when you can have Friends,
and Everybody Loves Raymond, if not their
Republican neighbor. She never imagined how much
she would miss a million things lived
in a single thirty-second beer commercial.
Now, she wishes he were here. A thousand lovers later
she’d tell him, for her, America was
the hollow of his back, the cars
running on fireflies outside, and she with him,
hip to buttock through the night, wanting nothing
more than what they had.