My First Thanksgiving on Hispaniola

By Jasminne Mendez
Thursday morning in Boca Chica my beloved wonders
how this small mouth, pocket beach on a close-lipped island got its name.

Maybe it was a Taino word that was shaped into
something the Spaniards could say without spitting.

Or maybe when those invaders saw it from the sea they salivated
and said: “That looks like something small we could sink

our teeth into.” And so it was how they devoured everything.
How they dragged us out of paradise and into the mouth of ruin.

How they came and conquered flesh and cane and robbed
the earth and the land and the body of its sweetness.

How they whipped it out of us until we became cream—nothing
but something that dissolves under this endless summer sun.

If you love a place, at best you’re a patriot, at worst
you’re a nationalist and I wish to be neither of those things.

I am longing to return home, to find a bird or a flower bud,
a bison or a bosom that hasn’t been touched or tainted by tyranny.

I want to feast on what we cannot harvest—the wind and its song,
an ocean wave and the rain, an old man’s laughter and my hands

dipped in honey and soil soaked in what they stole from us.


Notes:

This poem is part of the portfolio “The Chorus These Poets Create: Twenty Years of Letras Latinas.” You can read the rest of the portfolio in the December 2024 issue.

Source: Poetry (December 2024)