To the Man Who Killed My Poem
We meet on a rainy evening in early March. Earlier that week, I had been lying in Dolores Park listening to a John Lennon song, and I thought of Kahlil Gibran when I heard the lyrics where Lennon paraphrases him: “Half of what I say is meaningless, but I say it just to reach you.”
On Friday evening, the idea materializes in my mind: Find the Gibran book and you will find the poem you’re trying to write. I walk alone, after dinner with friends, to Dog Eared Books on Valencia Street. It’s drizzling, and I rub raindrops out of my balding head as I enter the store. I’m wearing the leather jacket my building handyman gave me as a gift. My beard’s grown down almost to my chest now. My father would call me Wolverine.
By 9:30 p.m., I’m in the special shelf they have for Kahlil Gibran’s books. Between familiar classics like The Prophet and Jesus, the Son of Man, I notice an older volume, hardbound and blue; in a burgundy text box, faded letters lined in gold: Tears and Laughter. I pick it up and open the title page, run my fingers over its sturdy, yellowed paper.
Aquí está.
With care, I turn to an aleatory poem. Somewhere in the middle, I land on these verses: “I am like the ages—building today / And destroying tomorrow; I am like a god, who creates and ruins; / I am sweeter than a violet’s sigh…”
I pick it up and walk around some more, lingering by the display shelves.
That’s when you first speak to me.
Hey, you’re that guy, right?
I half turn to get a look at you. You’re behind me, by another table. Your face reminds me of an old friend. You are bald like him, with a long and beaky nose, like a blue guacamayo’s bill. Small black eyes and a beard trimmed close to the skin. You wear red earbuds and a black winter coat. This—what you wear, and what you say—is all I know about you.
I ignore you, assuming you’re speaking to someone else, even though no one else is near us. I’m a big man—unavoidable, even when I try to avoid people. When I let my beard grow and look bushy because I’m not grooming myself to blend in, I stand out all the more. Maybe that’s what caught your eye—my beard. A generous bush, a canopy-collar of expanding hair, wide and black with some white streaks in the middle. You call me something else. You say, Yeah, your name is Amir, or Akbar, or Amoor or some shit, and you’re from somewhere in Arabia, right?
This is all I say to you:
I don’t know you, man.
Don’t deny it, you shoot back. You’re a long fucking way from home, so you better go back to where you came from before I bomb you back to the middle eastern stone ages, you fat arab motherfucker.
You stop and laugh and cock your head up like you’ve hit the world’s best punchline. I walk away but you follow me. You stop close, but not so close that your breath lands on me, just close enough to spill all the other low-hanging fruits of your mind, from your cannon of a mouth: You fat fucking piece of brown terrorist shit, you look like a monkey, like a big fat arab fucking monkey, so go back to the fucking border, show us your green card, you better know I’m never gonna forget…
You speak to me like it’s personal, like this is an episode in a long and intimate history of violence that we share. And that’s how it is: one second I’m invisible, the next I am thrust into the hypervisible, onto the stage of the world’s wars. I look away and yet I smell it on you, I see it on your face: you want me to strike first. But I don’t. Between fight and flight, I am dead-frozen, looking for backup.
“You stop and laugh and cock your head up like you’ve hit the world’s best punchline. I walk away but you follow me. You stop close, but not so close that your breath lands on me, just close enough to spill all the other low-hanging fruits of your mind, from your cannon of a mouth”
I catch an employee’s eye.
They shake awake from their humdrum bookstore stupor and shout at you on my behalf to interrupt your tirade, and you shout at them right back. I’m glad at least to no longer bear the full brunt of your attention.
You’re no longer welcome here, a manager says.
And you screech, like a kid, You’re no longer welcome here!
Get out, the manager shouts—
Get out! you yell back, pitching your voice even higher.
The manager and another employee corner you into the bookstore’s lone entrance. Your back is to the street as you face us. I stand back and say nothing, but still I hear the last thing you say, with one last look at my face. You know what’s coming for you. Then you are gone.
The manager charges at the door, broom in hand like it’s a sword, runs out to the wet Valencia street as he yells at your receding figure, And don’t fucking come back here, you asshole! Curious pedestrians in the thoroughfare get a look at you walking fast with the red earbuds. And they all move on with their lives. I’m not there, but the crescent moon looks the same as in another memory, where I sit on a stoop and smoke with a Palestinian friend and he tells me, Thing is Rolando, you got the look—your eyebrows, your eyes, your lips, your beard. You look Palestinian, man! You could blend in with us any day of the week.
The first time I witnessed racial profiling, it was aimed at my father. I was twelve. We were at the security line in Luis Muñoz Marín International Airport. That’s in San Juan, Puerto Rico—the archipelago nation people like me call by its Taíno name, Borikén. Stranger, I am a Boricua, and this is the place I call home.
That year, our entire family of five was heading out for the usual visit to Florida. I was right behind my father when a TSA officer stopped him for a “random” private search. It happened at any airport we went to; and as time passed, I became visually suspicious as well. By 2003, my moustache had grown over my often-grinning lips, and the beard had flourished below it. Even more, my brows met at my glabella, and I barely ever shaved. At airports, the TSA officers began selecting me for random security checks. And I took those pat-downs and scans as rites of initiation. My family joked about it. My mother says that when I came out of her womb, I looked like a bolita de pelo. A little ball of hair. At home, this is mono, cute. But mono means monkey, too.
“My skin traverses universes—it is transversal. My body is big and hairy but its luster is also subtle, because my bigness gives people space to see themselves when they look at me as I am. And when I am warm I give space.”
Borikén, I’ve heard, is an invisible country, and we are an invisible people, a country hidden inside a territory, a territory divided inside complexes of imaginaries. Borikén is something every Borinqueño defines against the judgments of someone like Karl Stephen Herrman, a soldier who took part in the American invasion of Puerto Rico in 1898, who wrote in his diaries that most of us were “ignorant, filthy, untruthful, lazy, treacherous, murderous, brutal.” But, he further wrote, when we are at our best, we are docile and hospitable. Between then and now, it’s been more than 120 years. And in 2022, you call me a fat arab motherfucker, missing my nationality by an entire hemisphere, though the prejudice is the same.
Still, so many of my planetary siblings see themselves in me instead. My skin traverses universes—it is transversal. My body is big and hairy but its luster is also subtle, because my bigness gives people space to see themselves when they look at me as I am. And when I am warm I give space. And when I give space people feel free and safe. That’s when I hear them sing. I love to hear people sing. And there will be time for the singers, but this letter is about you. You don’t sing when you feel my space around you. You speak to me of someone I don’t know.
*
After you leave, I put down the Kahlil Gibran book.
I can’t buy it, not tonight.
You have a magnificent beard, an employee tells me. I thank him and leave. I’m still overwhelmed, my body feels both explosive and stymied. My walk is an aimless search. In the dark I find only gusts and figures shifting in the street corners, words threatening to burgeon into air from sacks of errant human energy. I wonder if you’re still looking for me. Every man is dangerous. Every shadow hides a dagger. From any corner, you might emerge. I arrive paranoid to my apartment. I crash into bed exhausted. I dream bitter dreams. I don’t write the poem. I want to blame you and I want to forgive you. And between those two extremes, grief leaves me empty for words that never arrive, and I become the ambulant lloripari who takes every beating heart for a doctor or a teacher. So the only thing that I say to you is true, and there is grief in it as well as rage:
I don’t know you.
About the Author
Photo by Frances Deng
Rolando André López is a writer and poet born in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Currently, he lives in San Francisco, California, where he is an MFA candidate in Creative Writing at California College of the Arts. His work has been published in Orca Literary Journal, Passages North, Konch Magazine, and elsewhere. He is a 2021-2022 Puerto Rican Artist Resident at the Massachusetts Museum of Modern Art. You can find him on Instagram: @nocolornocontrast.
Read Rolando’s “Behind the Essay” interview in our newsletter.
Header photo by Josh Wilburne.
Edited by Aube Rey Lescure.
