Susana Praver-Pérez

 Love Poem as Mixtape in 4/4 Time

 The brass weaves a hammock of sound
         that rocks us.           
And me, a woman with a silver flute in hand asks,  

Who says you can’t make a trombone sing?
Who says the freedom I feel singing 
      in the shower can’t be 
         the rouge 
      that blooms
         on my cheeks?

I sing in the key of C minor.
We all hold keys to locked doors—
Sometimes, the power
      to change 
lies in the twist of our wrists. 

Sing to me, trombone man
      tumbao man   dancing
                  with sway
                  in your hips.
Sing to me, a melding song. 

Casar means to marry
though truly, it means to house—
“Casa de Amor” plucked on a guitar,
      wafted through the rafters
            of the roof we shared.

Palmieri’s arpeggios
      made our avocados grow 
            tall in terra-cotta pots 
      in our top-floor walk-up,

      wiped away the shrill
            of sirens, the screech
            of burnt rubber, the shriek
            of mean streets.

We sailed on woodwinds
‘til your eyes became stars
      in the dark.

I clip beatific words, 
nail them to four walls,
read them by candlelight
      while Mijo de la Palma sings
      “Puerto Rico en cuatro velas”.
His song is our soundtrack,
even now that you’re gone.  

I chant you a cha-cha, remember 
the slide of our feet
on the dance floor as if
      all four of our feet 
      were one.

I hum the anthems alone now,
“Preciosa” a flock of yellow-eyed blackbirds
      floating on updrafts
      from Mark Anthony’s lungs.

Silent all winter,
songbirds sing again,
like irises piercing mud,

while a trombone echoes
through the vale.

El Reverendo Pedro Juan Pietri: A Tribute

They left Ponce in 1947 
when he was barely bigger than a grasshopper,                   
gallinas and cafeteras stuffed in their pockets—

left pa’ los barrios de Nueva Yol
where the kitchen of their apartment
doubled as sleep room, sala, and closet. 

The Great Migration uprooted
more than half a million Boricuas, 
music steeped in cuero y cuerdas
trailing in their wake, 

pursuing promises 
of gold paved streets—
or at least a paycheck
thicker than un billete de la lotería. 

They worked
ten days a week
and were only paid for five * 

buying bags of habichuelas    
from the corner bodega
with an endless I.O.U. ,

being called spic on US streets
even after fighting on the front lines
in Viet Nam.  

El Reverendo saw all this
through newly opened Young Lords’ eyes,
through Nuyorican Poets’ eyes, 

kept recipes to revive colonized souls
in a black suitcase—

and when AIDS raged,
rained fistfuls of condoms
on his listeners 

as he preached
wisdom of thorny ceiba trees—

granting himself permission    
to believe in God again 

because he’d seen a grasshopper
staring at the still moist dew of his thoughts
on the 39th floor of a red-brick high-rise.

_______________________________________________

*This stanza is a quote from Pedro Pietri’s epic poem, “Puerto Rican Obituary”

The last 2 stanzas of this poem references Pietri’s “Ode to a Grasshopper ( I Hope)”