Mayaguez, Puerto Rico: A Short History.

Gugliel-Moni, Linda Maria Rodriguez

Mayaguez, Puerto Rico: A Short History

 It's hot, or it rains;
 the sun lifts the sheets of the rain, and the gutters
 run out. For those to whom history is the
 presence
 of ruins, there is a green nothing.

 --Derek Walcott
 Omeros Book Five, Chapter XXXVII, iii

 Sleepy under a tropical sun you loll in wait,
 city of good waters, Sultana of the west.
 Namesake of a Taino chief, your people hide
 in their blood his near silent genetic code.

 Once a blooming Caribbean city port, your bay wide open
 attracted the ambitious children and stepchildren
 of the Iberian and Italian peninsulas as well as Irish pirates
 leaving behind freckled babies and wine-dark seas.

 Now as then here too are your Lulua, Bemba and Yoruba children
 in the shade of yellow and orange flamboyants hidden.
 And as the juicy sweetness of mangoes rolling down a hill
 they are ever constant, valued by none but desired by all.

 Now as then brown-lipped prostitutes live off your salty streets,
 drugs, disease and death their constant birthrights.
 On Calle Comercio they please until a customer decides
 one or more are to blame for his wife's + HIV and STD tests.

 Now as then alien industries feed off your population,
 as StarKist, who fired and forgot them all after the duration.
 Yet, while terminally lifting the stench of tuna guts off their
 nostrils
 pledged everlasting residues to eat away at lungs and hearts.

 Now as then Christopher Columbus, his almighty heels digging
 into a petrified terrestrial globe balanced above an expanding
 over-budget fountain, lives among your inmates forecasting stony
 futures
 from the plaza, not knowing he had reached other shores.

 In the meantime some lively sato dogs, in the company of a skinny
 pregnant woman who daily begs at the lights, wander in and out of a
 dusty
 mayor's office and the Nuestra Senora de la Candelaria cathedral
 in search of their (un)justly promised legacy to the "New World."

 12:30 pm
 7/ 21/ 02

Linda Maria Rodriguez Gugliel-Moni was born in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and has lived in England, Washington, D.C., Michigan, and California. She studied at Georgetown, Dijon, Oxford, and the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor. Her visual poetry collection, Metropolitan Fantasies--textos errantes, was published in 2001. She edited Enlaces: Transnacionalidad--El Caribe y su Diaspora--(2000), proceedings of the Seventh International Conference of Caribbean Women Writers and Scholars, a project she directed and for which she received an NEH. Her work has appeared in From Totems to Hip-Hop, The Caribbean Writer, Sargasso, Mango Season, MaComere, and Thamyris. In 2002 she was awarded an Associate Artist position at the Atlantic Center for the Arts, where she worked with Ishmael Reed, and in 2004 completed a Residence with Elmaz Abinader at the Voices of Nations Arts Foundation. Her short story, "The Galician," was the 2006 winner of The Raymond Carver Best Story Award by a Non-North American Author and also was awarded third prize by the Society for the Study of the Short Story at the 9th