By Raquel Salas Rivera
We have lived on the horizon for so long,
coasts no longer know our flags.
They buried us where they bury ships,
Commonwealth projects, and literary whales,
which represent no threat.
Someday, a great writer will claim
we were an idea the breadth of an ocean
and, being dead, we will agree.
Translated from the Spanish by the author
Notes:
Read the Spanish-language original by Raquel Salas Rivera, “Todes recibimos la invitación.”
Source: Poetry (November 2022)
Poet Bio
Raquel Salas Rivera was born in Puerto Rico and currently lives in Philadelphia. Of their work, informed by Leftist politics as well as Spanish language literary traditions, Rivera has said, “There are poems like solidarities. This is the most ideal case. It makes people reach out to me, like after a reading, when I write something and other Boricuas are like, ‘This poem about the debt made me cry.’ When I see them cry, and they're thanking me for writing it, that's not just a poem. It becomes larger than itself. It becomes an interaction in the world, which is doing a kind of political work.” They are the 2018–19 poet laureate of Philadelphia and a co-organizer of the festival We (Too) Are Philly.
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