If you ask me why I left Puerto Rico,
I would tell you that it wasn’t because
Hurricane María left me with a bloated album
of waiting for the black black blackouts
to skip between the trees. It wasn’t because
the roofs unfurled and the doors retreated to hollows
somewhere in the sky. It wasn’t because
of the shelves of water, inching like new constellations
across an endless night. It was the full circle
of fear, the kind that stays in my mouth
like neon jawbreakers, refusing to surrender, tailor-made
to dislocate words that I long to speak. I dread
colliding against this familiar: when the memory gathers
like burning hands around your throat.
This poem first appeared in Claw & Blossom and In Inheritance of Drowning.
—
Dorsía Smith Silva is the author of In Inheritance of Drowning (CavanKerry, 2024), which was a finalist for theWhirling Prize and reviewed by Publishers Weekly. She is an eight-time Pushcart Prize nominee, Best of the Net finalist, Best New Poets nominee, Cave Canem Poetry Prize Semifinalist, Obsidian Fellow, Poetry Editor at The Hopper, and Full Professor at the University of Puerto Rico. Literary Hub, Poets.org, and The Los Angeles Review have published her work.
