Backstage with the Features

Yesenia Montilla

POWER COUPLE

For Eric

some nights I want a public love
with a private table at Alinea, Saturday
nights stumbling out of a club on south
beach, holding hands, making out like
a porn dream, holidays in St. Tropez
or Santorini my tanned body laying out
on some boat of the coast of somewhere
beautiful. But that’s not what I have.
Instead, my love is a reserved & sequestered
fever that burns all day regardless of
the weather, regardless of how much
we have in the bank or that we know
nothing of jet setting & resort wear.
It lives in Harlem. It speaks with a sweet
soca mouth. No one knows of us, we
don’t have fans, we have a bodeguero
that loves us and sometimes gives us a
free scratch off porque solo dios sabe.
It loves rice & beans as a full meal. It
thinks KitKats are fancy chocolate. It
is a sweet consumption this love, & when
I lose myself in those moments, the whole
world disappears, It’s like loving wind &
hurricane, fire & the wildflowers after, like
being loved by the whole universe at once
an affair so influential you’d think us rich—

the earth is a hurricane of persecuted stars,

for everyone these days
a constant humming
like a hundred starlings
or honeybees adoring one
another even against
wind, or mist, or a smoky
orange sky full of flames
& ash—but this too is a
surrender to purpose; purple
engorged wildflowers that
bloom after the blaze. How
necessary for our eyes who
look upon the blanketed new
with holiness, our mouths
open in prayer awaiting us
a fresh daybreak—

The Earth is a Hurricane of Persecuted Stars takes its title from The Wooden horse #3 by the late great Puerto Rican nationalist, poet, journalist and activist Clemente Soto Velez.