Diasporican Interview feat. René Marqués

How much will it cost to bury your father in Puerto Rico?*

A Caribe he hasn’t touched since he was my age.

The family he hasn’t seen in decades.

All the Hail Mary’s he uttered in Spanish

on this side of the Atlantic.

How much will it cost to bury your father in Puerto Rico?

My love is Malagasy.

One summer she visited a family tomb,

witnessed a bone turning ceremony and sent me the video.

She tells me her father will be buried in the family tomb.

When I don’t watch the video right away, she questions

why I can’t see how important this is to her.

She tells me she wants our children to visit one day,

to visit their ancestors.

How much will it cost to bury your father in Puerto Rico?

My abuela was born in Ponce. Died in New York. Was buried in Miami.

My dad was born in Ponce. Grew up in New York. Now lives in Seattle.

How much will it cost to bury your father in Puerto Rico?

When my love asks where we’ll bury my dad,

I have no answer. How do you dig a grave

for someone whose bones have grown accustomed

to shuffling, have never known a soil

that wanted to hold them?

How much will it cost to bury your father in Puerto Rico?

When my love asks where I want my ashes scattered,

I can’t decide on Pacific or Atlantic,

on African, Caribbean, or US shores.

I’ve always known dust to be a poor vehicle for the soul

and water too expedient a vehicle for the body.

How much of me will be left by the time

the dirt hits the ocean’s waves?

How much will it cost to bury your father in Puerto Rico?

I’ve only ever been to Puerto Rico once.

It was on someone else’s dime.

It was on Puerto Rico’s dime.

By the time I left I was ready to be back

in my own bed. I knew this place

would never be my home.

How much will it cost to bury your father in Puerto Rico?

A casket or urn that will carry him out.

A flight back across the Atlantic.

A funeral plot on a piece of land

that may be his, but will never be mine.

*Adapted from the line in René Marqués’s La carreta: “No quiero que lo entierren en ehta tierra sin sol. ¿Cohtará mucho llevarlo a Puerto Rico?”

Nocturne: Downtown to West Seattle

If I’m being honest, I’ve always preferred the bus
at night. Something about dark skies and fluorescent lights
turning the city obsidian; something about only being able
to focus on the steady grind of public transit gears
pushing wheels, one thing I have always been able to trust.
If I’m being honest, there isn’t much difference between a late fall
Seattle morning and a late fall Seattle night: city dark, air wet
with the mist that feeds the moss. If I’m being honest, I am most me
struggling not to fall asleep on a bus—body packed into a seat,
joints stacked one on top of another despite every effort to stretch,
head bouncing off the window every few minutes. If I’m being honest,
I only half-like these new buses, miss the days when niggas used to
scratch graffiti into a polycarbonate glazing. If I’m being honest,
I’m my dad’s child, will always take comfort over new shit and it’s not
that I’m against this changing city, just that all the shit changing
is pushing me and mine away. Barely one year ago I helped my parents
move out their home of 14 years. For the first time in over 30 years
they do not live in the South End. If I’m being honest, I am against
this changing city. I miss the 106, and damn sure miss the 7. 
                                                                                                   I am on a bus
not headed to Rainier Beach and am struggling to see the city
around it. I am struggling for any well-lit stop to map my body on this route.
I am struggling to map my body in this city. If I’m being honest, I’m struggling
to be anything more than a body that can be swallowed into the night.

                       – November 15, 2019

Malcolm Friend is a poet originally from the Rainier Beach neighborhood of Seattle, Washington. He received his BA from Vanderbilt University, and his MFA from the University of Pittsburgh. He is the author of the chapbook mxd kd mixtape (Glass Poetry, 2017) and the full-length collection Our Bruises Kept Singing Purple (Inlandia Books, 2018), selected by Cynthia Arrieu King as winner of the 2017 Hillary Gravendyk Prize. Together with JR Mahung he is a member of Black Plantains, an Afrocaribbean poetry collective.