Nicole Cecilia Delgado
Translated from the Spanish by Urayoán Noel
Behind the city, among other things,
she plants various kinds of oregano leaf,
makes bread in a wood oven,
rolls cigarettes,
boils four eggs and strains two
cups of coffee.

The trees are grown.
The little dog had an accident
but she's on the mend.
Teófilo gave me back Fidelia, she says,
I don't know how
I'm going to take the goats with me.

Cabo Rojo flutters across her eyes.
She sees herself crossing the island by foot
with her flock.
And how's this country treating you?—
she looks at me and asks.

It's been months since we last saw each other.
There is wisdom in willful resignation.
In search of simplicity we complicate our lives;
as time goes by time doesn't feel the same.

Sitting on the balcony floor
with many important things to talk about,
just the two of us.
On a cloudy summer Thursday afternoon,
no more resistance or struggle possible.

Sitting on the balcony floor
we watch the bamboo grow.

I go on to tell her stories
about my poor plants.

She's still thinking about the future,
on the other side of government but on this side
of conspiracy theories,
her mode of revolution
is blunt force.
Pesticide and hive
are not metaphors in this house.

I admit that I cry with anger
in the municipal patent office;
as much as I'm against
the Financial Oversight Board,
I too can't find my place
in the performance of politics.

With no time for polite preambles
nor peaceful demonstrations,
our work consumes us
and the jungle inhabits us.
Pulse echoing through hands:

it's not the country it's the land
it's not the country it's the land

it's not the country it's the land

it's not the country it's

friendship.
from the book OBJETOS ENCONTRADOS/FOUND OBJECTS / DoubleCross Press
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This poem first appeared in Delgado's 2019 book "Periodo Especial" (Aguadulce/La Impresora), which explores the socioeconomic mirror images between the Greater Antilles in light of Puerto Rico's ongoing financial crisis. Norysell Massanet, a friend of the poet, is an independent farmer and environmental activist (@laboticadelatierra) in Cabo Rojo, a town on the southwest coast of Puerto Rico's main island. Delgado's privileging of land rights and women-led environmental and agricultural initiatives is a significant departure from largely patriarchal and urban-centered histories of socially engaged Puerto Rican poetry.

Urayoán Noel on "Conversation with Norysell Massanet"
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"War is unreal until we feel the cold, precise metal cutting, as Zagajewski once had it, 'diligently, as in a child's cutout / along the dotted line of a roe deer or a swan.' From the fire and metal falling through the sky, the people of Kyiv, Lviv, Kharkiv, Odessa hide—in subway tunnels, in basements, in cars along roads that can no longer guide them to safety." 

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