100 Refutations | Poetry | Puerto Rico | Spanish
April, 2018i hope you feel the sting of
platano poppin’ oil
i hope when you try to jump back,
one drop jumps a second quicker onto your hand
and i hope when you bite into it, thinking the sting was worth it,
you realize you didn’t let the platano ripen enough
and it ain’t even that sweet
just like you.
Claritza Maldonado, better known as Clari (as stated by her gold cadenita), is a creative writer, poet, and researcher from Chicago. She holds a BA in Linguistics with a minor in Latina/o Studies from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is currently a graduate student at Brown University in the American Studies PhD program with a Public Humanities focus. Her poetry has been published at the Wanderer Poetry literary website. Her research and creative writing purposefully overlap by way of language and content. Broadly, her research interests include cultural studies, media studies, performance studies, and Latina/o literature. As an aspiring curator/educator, she aims to situate her work between cityscape and island, intermingled with Spanglish. Her poems are stories of familia, history, conversation, observation, cultura, and resistance.
Urayoán Noel is an associate professor of English and Spanish at New York University, and also teaches at the MFA of the Americas at Stetson University. His books include, most recently, the poetry collection Buzzing Hemisphere/ Rumor Hemisférico (University of Arizona Press) and the critical study In Visible Movement: Nuyorican Poetry from the Sixties to Slam (University of Iowa Press). He is currently completing a book based on his improvisational poetry vlog (www.wokitokiteki.com) as well as two translation projects: a bilingual edition of the Chilean poet Pablo de Rokha, Architecture of Dispersed Life: Selected Poetry, forthcoming from Shearsman Books, and a chapbook by Garifuna Guatemalan poet Wingston González for Ugly Duckling Presse. Originally from Puerto Rico, Urayoán Noel lives in the South Bronx.
Copyright (c) Claritza Maldonado. English translation copyright (c) Urayoán Noel, 2018.