Floaters Read online

  when the hurricane gutted the mountain the way a butcher slices open

  a dangled pig, and a rolling wall of mud buried them, leaving the fourth

  sister to stagger into the street, screaming like an unheeded prophet

  about the end of the world. In Utuado, a man who cultivated a garden

  of aguacate and carambola, feeding the avocado and star fruit to his

  nieces from New York, saw the trees in his garden beheaded all at once

  like the soldiers of a beaten army, and so hanged himself. In Utuado,

  a welder and a handyman rigged a pulley with a shopping cart to ferry

  rice and beans across the river where the bridge collapsed, witnessed

  the cart swaying above so many hands, then raised a sign that told

  the helicopters: Campamento los Olvidados: Camp of the Forgotten.

  Los olvidados wait seven hours in line for a government meal of Skittles

  and Vienna sausage, or a tarp to cover the bones of a house with no roof,

  as the fungus grows on their skin from sleeping on mattresses drenched

  with the spit of the hurricane. They drink the brown water, waiting

  for microscopic monsters in their bellies to visit plagues upon them.

  A nurse says: These people are going to have an epidemic. These people

  are going to die. The president flips rolls of paper towels to a crowd

  at a church in Guaynabo, Zeus lobbing thunderbolts on the locked ward

  of his delusions. Down the block, cousin Ricardo, Bernice’s boy, says

  that somebody stole his can of diesel. I heard somebody ask you once

  what Puerto Rico needed to be free. And you said: Tres pulgadas

  de sangre en la calle: Three inches of blood in the street. Now, three

  inches of mud flow through the streets of Utuado, and troops patrol

  the town, as if guarding the vein of copper in the ground, as if a shovel

  digging graves in the backyard might strike the ore below, as if la brigada

  swinging machetes to clear the road might remember the last uprising.

  I know you are not God. I have the proof: seven pounds of ashes in a box

  on my bookshelf. Gods do not die, and yet I want you to be God again.

  Stride from the crowd to seize the president’s arm before another roll

  of paper towels sails away. Thunder Spanish obscenities in his face.

  Banish him to a roofless rainstorm in Utuado, so he unravels, one soaked

  sheet after another, till there is nothing left but his cardboard heart.

  I promised myself I would stop talking to you, white box of grey grit.

  You were deaf even before you died. Hear my promise now: I will take you

  to the mountains, where houses lost like ships at sea rise blue and yellow

  from the mud. I will open my hands. I will scatter your ashes in Utuado.

  Note on the Cover Photograph

  My father, Frank Espada, was a documentary photographer and the creator of the Puerto Rican Diaspora Documentary Project, a photo documentary and oral history of the Puerto Rican migration. The project resulted in more than forty solo exhibitions and a book entitled The Puerto Rican Diaspora: Themes in the Survival of a People (2006). His work is included in the collections of the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the National Portrait Gallery, and the Library of Congress.

  One of my father’s photographs appears on the cover of this book. This is Angel Luis Jiménez, Evicted Mushroom Worker, Kennett Square, PA, 1981. A migrant from Caguas, Puerto Rico, Jiménez had nine children; in the photograph, he is explaining his eviction. He said: “Aquí venimos a pasar hambre y amarguras” (“We come here to suffer hunger and bitterness”). The quotation would appear on the wall next to the photograph in my father’s exhibitions.

  The photograph reflects many subjects and themes of the poetry: migrants and migration, the dead and the hunger that drove them to swim across borders, the evicted tenants I represented as a lawyer, the young people playing soccer in an internment camp, my wife’s high school students, the victims and survivors of hurricanes, and my father, himself a migrant to this country, who would one day speak for others like him through his art.

  Notes on the Poems

  Jumping Off the Mystic Tobin Bridge: From 1987 to 1993, I served as supervisor of Su Clínica Legal, a legal services program for low-income, Spanish-speaking tenants in Chelsea, outside Boston. Stanza five refers to Chuck Stewart, who shot and killed his pregnant wife, Carol DiMaiti Stewart, on October 23, 1989, blamed the killing on an invented African American carjacker, then committed suicide when his brother Matthew confessed his complicity and identified Chuck as the killer. This section of the poem relies in part on “Charles Stuart’s Awful Legacy, In Black and White,” by Adrian Walker, in the Boston Globe, October 24, 2014.

  Floaters: Óscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez and Angie Valeria Martínez Ávalos, a migrant father and daughter from El Salvador, drowned crossing the Río Grande between Matamoros, México, and Brownsville, Texas, on June 23, 2019. Julia Le Duc, a journalist with the Mexican newspaper La Jornada, photographed their bodies the following day, reporting the eyewitness account of Tania Vanessa Ávalos, Óscar’s wife and Valería’s mother. The photograph went everywhere, appearing on the front page of the New York Times. An anonymous post on the page of the “I’m 10-15” Border Patrol Facebook group, representing nearly ten thousand current and former Border Patrol agents, alleged that the photograph had been doctored or staged. “Floaters” is the term often used by Border Patrol agents to describe those who have drowned attempting to cross. “The archbishop of the poor” refers to Óscar Romero, the archbishop of San Salvador, a champion of human rights assassinated by a right-wing gunman while saying mass on March 24, 1980. The poem relies in part on several background sources: “ ‘They Wanted the American Dream’: reporter reveals story behind tragic photo” by Julia Le Duc, in the Guardian, June 25, 2019; “Here’s the Story Behind the Horrific Photo of the Man and Toddler Drowning at the Border” by Amanda Kaufman, in the Boston Globe, June 26, 2019; “Óscar y Valeria, despedidos entre oraciones y homenajes durante entierro” by Diana Escalante, in El Salvador.com, July 2, 2019; “Dan el ultimo adiós a Óscar y Angie Valeria en panteón de San Salvador” by Agent France-Presse, in La Jornada, July 2, 2019; and “Inside the Secret Border Patrol Facebook Group Where Agents Joke About Migrant Deaths and Post Sexist Memes” by A. C. Thompson, in ProPublica, July 1, 2019.

  Ode to the Soccer Ball Sailing Over a Barbed Wire Fence: The epigraph comes from “Tent City Operator’s Request for Policy Shift Could Reduce the Mass Detention of Migrant Children” by Robert Moore, in Texas Monthly, December 15, 2018. This poem relies in part on personal conversations and emails with Camilo Pérez-Bustillo, former advocacy director of the Hope Border Institute in El Paso, Texas, and an organizer of the successful campaign to shut down the camp, who interviewed incarcerated migrant children at the Tornillo camp.

  Not for Him the Fiery Lake of the False Prophet: In the early hours of August 19, 2015, two South Boston brothers, Scott and Steve Leader, beat a homeless Mexican man, Guillermo Rodríguez, they found sleeping outside the JFK subway station on the Red Line. The brothers pleaded guilty and were sentenced to three and two and a half years in prison, respectively. “Rodríguez” in stanza one refers to Eduardo Rodríguez, Venezuelan-born pitcher for the Boston Red Sox. The quotes from Scott Leader and Donald Trump in stanzas two and four come from “South Boston Brothers Allegedly Beat Homeless Man” by Sara DiNatale and Maria Sachetti, in the Boston Globe, August 19, 2015. The epigraph comes from “Here’s Donald Trump’s Presidential Announcement Speech” by Time staff in Time magazine, June 16, 2015.

  Boxer Wears America 1st Shorts in Bout With Mexican, Finishes Second: The title comes from an article of the same name in the Washington Post by Matthew Bonesteel, April 13,
2018. Born in Ciudad de México, Francisco “El Bandido” Vargas was World Boxing Council super featherweight champion (2015–17). The “Frito Bandito” was the cartoon mascot for Fritos Corn Chips from 1967 through 1971.

  Mazen Sleeps With His Foot on the Floor: Mazen Naous is a professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and the author of Poetics of Visibility in the Contemporary Arab American Novel (Ohio State University Press, 2020). This poem is based on personal conversations about his experiences growing up in Beirut during the civil war in Lebanon (1975–90). An “oud,” from the Arabic, is a stringed instrument similar to the lute used in the music of the Middle East and North Africa.

  I Now Pronounce You Dead: In April 1920, a payroll robbery occurred at a shoe factory in South Braintree, Massachusetts, resulting in the murder of a paymaster and a payroll guard. Two Italian anarchists, Nicola Sacco, a shoemaker, and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, a fish peddler, were tried and convicted in an atmosphere of anti-immigrant bigotry and political hysteria. An international movement arose to free them; the judge, Webster Thayer, referred to the defendants as “anarchist bastards” and denied repeated motions for a new trial. The quotations from Vanzetti, Warden William Hendry and other details of the execution in the first two stanzas come from “Sacco and Vanzetti Put to Death Early This Morning” in the New York Times, August 23, 1927. The former site of Charlestown State Prison in Boston, where Sacco and Vanzetti were executed, is now the site of Bunker Hill Community College, a school with a large immigrant population.

  Why I Wait for the Soggy Tarantula of Spinach: In the third stanza, the lines “I heard a poet deaf with age declaim a poem about seeing Halley’s / Comet as a boy in 1910” refer to Stanley Kunitz reading his poem “Halley’s Comet” from The Collected Poems: Stanley Kunitz (W. W. Norton, 2000).

  Asking Questions of the Moon: The epigraph comes from “Despúes de pasar” (“Afterwards”) in the Poema del cante jondo (Poem of the Deep Song) by Federico García Lorca, translated by Cola Franzen in the Collected Poems (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1991).

  Standing on the Bridge at Dolceacqua: Dolceaqua is a winemaking village in northwestern Italy, on the border with France. Claude Monet painted Dolceacqua, Bridge, in 1884. On March 25, 1911, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York killed 146 garment workers, mostly women and girls. Many of them jumped to their deaths.

  Aubade With Concussion: An “aubade,” from the French, is a poem or song about lovers parting at dawn. The epigraph comes from the poem “Poverty” in Wild Animals on the Moon by Naomi Ayala (Curbstone Press, 1997).

  I Would Steal a Car for You: “the crooning of a Cuban ballad singer on the car radio” refers to Ibrahim Ferrer of the Buena Vista Social Club, singing “Dos Gardenias.”

  That We Will Sing: The poem refers to Eva’s Village, an antipoverty organization with a residential substance abuse recovery program, serving mostly African American and Latinx clients in Paterson, New Jersey. “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” a poem written by James Weldon Johnson and set to music by his brother John Rosamond Johnson in 1900, came to be known as the Black National Anthem. The third stanza quotes “Plegaria a un Labrador,” or “Prayer to a Peasant,” by the legendary singer-songwriter and guitarist Víctor Jara of Chile. In the days following the military coup on September 11, 1973, Jara was tortured and shot dead at Estadio Chile in Santiago. Four years earlier, in July 1969, Jara received First Prize at the Festival de la Nueva Canción Chilena (Chilean New Song Festival) for “Plegaria a un Labrador” at the same arena where he would ultimately be murdered. Estadio Chile has been renamed Estadio Víctor Jara.

  Love Song of the Galápagos Tortoise: “Lonesome George” was considered the last surviving member of Chelonoidis abingdonii, a species of tortoise from Pinta Island in the Galápagos, when he died in 2012, aged more than one hundred years. Charles Darwin arrived on The Beagle in 1835. The first two stanzas rely in part on “Charles Darwin: Tortoise Hunter?” by Elizabeth Hennessy, published on the Yale University Press blog, November 18, 2019. Darwin’s observation, “Young tortoises make excellent soup,” comes from his journals: The Works of Charles Darwin, Vol. 3, Journal of Researches, Part Two, edited by Paul Barrett and R. B. Freeman (New York University Press, 1987).

  Love is a Luminous Insect at the Window: “Durán, the Panamanian brawler” refers to Roberto Durán, the lightweight, welterweight, light middleweight and middleweight boxing champion, who allegedly uttered the words “No más” when he quit in his rematch with Sugar Ray Leonard. “The Russian composer’s concerto” refers to the Violin Concerto in D Major, Opus 35 by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. I read this sonnet at my wedding.

  Insulting the Prince: The epigraph comes from a personal conversation with French poet and publisher Francis Combes. Stanza one refers to His Serene Highness Albert II, Sovereign Prince of Monaco, and Her Serene Highness Charlene, Princess of Monaco. Article 3 of the Constitution of the Principality provides that “The Prince’s persona is inviolable.”

  Remake of Me the Sickle for Thy Grain: Arturo Giovannitti was an Italian poet, socialist, orator and labor organizer with the Industrial Workers of the World. Giovannitti was an organizer of the celebrated Bread and Roses strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts (January–March 1912). More than twenty thousand workers, mostly immigrants, walked out of the textile mills, and would ultimately prevail. When police shot and killed striker Anna LoPizzo at a parade on January 29, 1912, authorities charged Giovannitti and fellow strike leader Joseph Ettor as accessories to murder and put them on trial for their lives in a Salem, Massachusetts, courtroom, where they sat with codefendant Joseph Caruso in cages during the proceedings. The title and refrain quote two lines from “The Cage,” written by Giovannitti at the time of his incarceration. Giovannitti and his codefendants were acquitted in November 1912. He published two books in 1914 with Hillacre Bookhouse: The Cage and a collection of poems called Arrows in the Gale, with an introduction by Helen Keller. The poem relies in part on History of the Labor Movement in the United States, Vol. 4: The Industrial Workers of the World, 1905–1917 by Philip Foner (International Publishers, 1965) and Rebel Voices: An IWW Anthology, edited by Joyce Kornbluh (Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company, 1988).

  Be There When They Swarm Me: Paul Mariani is a poet, essayist, biographer of poets, professor of English emeritus at Boston College and former professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He is the author of twenty books, including eight collections of poetry and biographies of William Carlos Williams, Hart Crane, John Berryman, Wallace Stevens, Robert Lowell and Gerard Manley Hopkins. The first stanza of this poem refers to the subject of Mariani’s poem “A&P Nightshift: January 1959” in his collection Epitaphs for the Journey: New, Selected and Revised Poems (Cascade Books, 2012). Stanza one also quotes The Broken Tower: The Life of Hart Crane (W. W. Norton, 2000). Stanza two quotes Mariani’s poem “Hornet’s Nest” from Ordinary Time (Slant/Wipf and Stock, 2020). The title and last line of my poem come from the Mariani poem.

  The Bard Shakes the Snow From the Trees: Donald Hall (1928–2018) was a poet, editor, essayist and baseball writer. He published more than fifty books, including fifteen collections of poetry. He served as poet laureate of the United States (2006–7) and received numerous awards, ranging from the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize to the National Medal of Arts. This poem is based on a visit with Hall at Eagle Pond Farm in Wilmot, New Hampshire, in February 2018, a few months before his death.

  Flan: Jack Agüeros (1934–2014) was a Puerto Rican poet, fiction writer, essayist, playwright, translator, community organizer and director of El Museo del Barrio in East Harlem. He died of complications from Alzheimer’s disease. I often referred to him as my “second father.” He published three collections of poetry and one collection of short fiction, and translated Song of the Simple Truth: The Complete Poems of Julia de Burgos (Curbstone, 1996). Stanza two refers to the subjects of five Agüeros sonnets from Correspondence Between the Stonehaulers (Hanging Loose, 1991) and
Sonnets From the Puerto Rican (Hanging Loose, 1996). Stanza four quotes the couplet from “Sonnet Substantially Like the Words of Fulano Rodríguez One Position Ahead of Me on the Unemployment Line.” Raúl Juliá (1940–1994) was a film and theater actor from Puerto Rico who played Macbeth in the New York Shakespeare Festival’s production at the Public Theater in 1990. La Taza de Oro (“The Cup of Gold”) was a Puerto Rican restaurant in the Chelsea section of Manhattan from 1947 to 2015. “Café con leche” is coffee with steamed milk.

  Morir Soñando: Luis Garden Acosta (1945–2019) was a major Puerto Rican/Dominican activist, community organizer and cofounder of El Puente, a multiservice community center for adolescents and others in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. He was also an important mentor of mine. The poem is based on my visit with him to the abandoned church that would become El Puente in 1982, an encounter cited in “Luis Garden Acosta, Resuscitator of a Brooklyn Neighborhood, Dies at 73” by Sam Roberts, in the New York Times, January 11, 2019. “La Masacre de Ponce,” or the Ponce Massacre, took place on March 21, 1937, in the city of Ponce, Puerto Rico, when police fired on a peaceful, pro-independence Nationalist Party march, killing 21 people and wounding more than 200. “Morir soñando” means “to die dreaming.” “Bomba” refers to a traditional form of Afro-Puerto Rican dance and percussion that originated on the sugar plantations of the island during the times of slavery. “Yoruba” refers to an ethnic group from West Africa. “Vejigantes” refers to costumed, masked figures at carnivals and festivals in Puerto Rico; the horned masks are considered emblematic of cultural identity.

  The Five Horses of Doctor Ramón Emeterio Betances: Called the “Padre de la Patria” or the “Father of the Nation,” Ramón Emeterio Betances (1827–1898) was a Puerto Rican revolutionary, abolitionist, essayist, novelist, diplomat and physician. Born in Cabo Rojo of partly African descent, he received his medical degree in Paris, returning in 1856 to a cholera epidemic in Puerto Rico that killed 25,000 to 30,000 people, including his stepmother, brother-in-law and approximately 10,000 under the yoke of slavery. He played a major role fighting the epidemic in the city of Mayagüez and elsewhere. Simultaneously, he emerged as an organizer of abolitionist “secret societies,” for which he was forced into exile. Betances was the architect of an insurrection against the Spanish in 1868, called the “Grito de Lares,” or “Battle Cry of Lares.” (He even designed the rebel flag.) The insurrection failed, but slavery was abolished in 1873. The poem as a whole draws upon “Betances y la epidemia del cólera” by Mario Cancel-Sepúlveda in Puerto Rico: su transformación en el tiempo (Editorial Cordillera, 2008) and “En los tiempos del cólera” by Félix Ojeda Reyes from Ramón Emeterio Betances: Obras completas (Vol. XIII), La Biografía I (ZOOMIdeal, 2018). Stanza two relies in part on “Epidemia y sociedad: efectos del cólera morbo en Puerto Rico y en Costa Rica a mediados del siglo XIX” by Ramonita Vega Lugo in IX Congreso Centroamericano de Historia (Universidad de Costa Rica, 2008). Stanza four relies in part on “For the Freedom of Enslaved Infants in Puerto Rico, 1850s” by Virginia Sánchez Korrol in the Huffington Post, April 7, 2014.