with passion, several coquís sing, though its already past dawn
meanwhile the cat considers her every step, and taking them, you can’t hear her
together, these observations could become an aspiration:
to exceed oneself delicately
con pasión, varios coquíes cantan, aunque ya ha amanecido
mientras, la gata considera cada uno de sus pasos y, al darlos, no se escuchan
juntas, tales observaciones podrían volverse una aspiración:
excederse con delicadeza
◊ ◊ ◊
the rain awaits the water and tree trunks drown in their altitude
meanwhile, there are hermit crabs sheltering along coastlines
resolute cats, born of those abandoned, at the beach
and stones shedding their surface to the water as it hits
la lluvia espera el agua y se ahogan los troncos en su altura
mientras, hay cobitos cobijándose en las costas
gatos resolutos, hijos de los que abandonamos, en la playa
y piedras mudando su superficie por el golpe de agua
Beatriz Llenín Figueroa is a writer, compañera, friend, comrade, gestora, walking body, and lover of live arts and animals. She holds a PhD in Literature from Duke University. Associate editor at Editora Educación Emergente since 2009. She is also a freelance editor and translator.She is the author of Puerto Islas: crónicas, crisis, amor (EEE, 2018) and Affect, Archive, Archipelago: Puerto Rico’s Sovereign Caribbean Lives (Rowman and Littlefield, 2022. Translations of her work have appeared in Hunger Mountain Review, Interim Poetics and others.
Guillermo Rebollo Gil (San Juan, 1979) is a writer, sociologist, translator, and attorney. His publications include poetry in Fence, Poetry Northwest, Second Factory and Whale Road Review; literary criticism in Annulet and The Smart Set; scholarly articles in the Journal of Autoethnography and Liminalities. He serves as editor at The Autoethnographer and associate CNF editor at JMWW. In 2020, the Spanish publisher Ediciones Liliputienses published a selection of his poetry under the title Informe de Logros: poemas 2000-2019. He is the author of Writing Puerto Rico: Our Decolonial Moment (2018) and Whiteness in Puerto Rico: Translation at a Loss (2023).
