"Statue of What?" in solidarity with Puerto Rico, artwork by Bo Thai
Coming Soon: Stories from Hurricane María
by Emma Crow-Willard and Roots of Unity Media
Aftershocks of Disaster: Puerto Rico Before and After the Storm,
edited by Yarimar Bonilla and Marisol LeBrón
If a Tree Falls in an Island: The Metaphysics of Colonialism
by Ana Portnoy Brimmer
published in Aftershocks of Disaster
Ah, what an age it is
When to speak of trees is almost a crime
For it is a kind of silence about injustice!
-Bertoldt Brecht
but even the trees spoke
snapping like dry bones / under the weighty foot of weather
sparking and slung over power lines
last attempt at sustained flight / sputtering sap and blood
branches a thousand arms reaching / routed / rotting
bark marbled fungus and termite
consider the fright of a flamboyán
skirts upturned
robbed of red / roots ripped
from the earth's scalp
consider the cry / of a carambola
struck down / stripped bare
starfruit putrid sweet
of the ground / lost aspiring body of the cosmos
consider the plight of a plantain
self-suffocated / wrapped in its own leaf / hijos dying inside
sprouting back like jagged teeth
twisting arthritic fingers / both growing and graves
to not speak of trees now / when even the trees
have spoken / is the deadliest of silences
for when a tree falls in an island / and the world
is around to hear it / the island drowns
for a tree is no longer a tree / and semantics like leaves change
it is memory burnt into body / 7 months piled up on a sidewalk
blocking the street / at your doorstep
blighted wood and abandonment
it is death at its slowest / an unlinking mirror
steadfast rustle / of gutting truth
that if a people fall on an island / and the world is around to hear it
we make a sound--but only the ocean responds / with a swallow