Poems

The Wild

At the police precinct, years ago, they had me
look at pictures of police horses.

I was to pick the one I saw
getting beaten by an officer
the night before.

Another officer said I picked the wrong one
to mess with,
dismissed my complaint.

In my anger, I could see myself clearly
busting into wherever the police kept their horses:

I would release them back into the wild,
watch them gallop right into noonday traffic,
stopping the city cold.

Instead, I was told to leave, and I left
without complaint.

I can’t say I became an adult that day. But I did
grow into my sadness more, or more sadness grew
into me.

It’s not that I cared about horses,
or about things being made to stop,
or allowing them to continue.

But I wanted to care.

Afterlives of the poets

Even now,
she likes to tease me in public about how I used to read
the most revolutionary poems
in Polo shirts.

Meanwhile, The Poets in the back were barefoot
shooting up.

She says they let me tag along
because everybody was crazy

to see the revolution
on the TV in my house.

Back then,
poetry parties were always crowded
because the houses where poetry lived were so tiny.

She says once The Poets started dying, the parties got even wilder.
But I was no longer invited on account of my stupid shirt.

It’s true. All of it. Except my poems
weren’t about revolution.

They were about the room
filling slowly with the spirits
of young dead radicals. And me
the only bougie poet left
to write about it.

The one thing that holds true about poetry
so long as you stay true to it—
it’s not about what you witness,
but how it impresses upon you.

I no longer live in the house I grew up in.

It was a struggle
but we managed to fit
that old TV in here.

El Hijo de Yvonne

Did he ever hit you?

No. Never.

Sometimes he would grab me, hard. Just above the elbow.
By both arms and shake me. One time—

We were in Mexico, for our honeymoon.

You can barely breathe in Mexico.

He pushed me against the mirror.

I think I remember a crack, at home, in your bedroom mirror.

Yes, there too. But no,
never.

*

The first thing that comes to mind
when I think about Mexico
is Mickey Rourke

in Once upon a time
in Mexico.

Then wrestling legend El Santo
and his son, El Hijo del Santo.

Then the story of my mother and father
and their honeymoon.

*

No, I never saw anything

I remember, a bunch of times, listening from the other side of the door
to what I imagined

must have been

shaking?

*

And so, at some point,
I must have asked.

This one time. In Mexico.
On our honeymoon.

I could ask again.
But then, wouldn’t my insistence—all these years later—be like
me driving my mother back into the crack
in the mirror for the sake of me
getting the story straight, for the sake of me
having a story to

This one time,
When my mother and father were.

This other time, also.

*

The first thing that comes to mind
when I think about my mother is

right before my father came home
or right after he left,

when it was—

not quiet,
but not loud either,

it was
how I learned to talk

was talking
with my mother—

I could ask her anything.

Reinitas

The first thing I learned
about birds is their eyes
take about 50 percent
of their heads.

The first thing I learned about me
after your birth is my heart
can take the wings
being taken off

a bird one by one.
But then you could never
be a bird. You would
already have to be a horse.

What’s better than a horse?

On my way to work
a small SUV ran over
a pony that had fallen
dead on the street.

The car got stuck
midbelly. I felt my eyes grow
to the size of baseballs
which is how big

they would need to be
to take up as much space
in my head as they do
in a bird.

A mule is better, or so say
the people who know things
about animals without having
to look them up.

We’re animals too, you say,
because you learned it in school
and I nod, thinking of that driver
atop a tiny mountain

of this horrible thing that he did.
By no means is it the most horrible
thing man or animal has ever done,
but still, he did it.

What do you do after you reach
the top of a mountain, I do not
hear you ask. I often think
about what it might be like

atop of other mountains, and could
you trade mountains
or are you stuck
with the one you climbed.

This is the question I saw
in that driver’s eyes. His head
looked so tiny in comparison,
I thought he might fly away.

Son, the first thing to know about
the animals we are is we do not die
by what we see. Every time
we have to wait somewhere

you ask me to pull up
pictures of birds on my phone. I call
half the birds I do not know
nightingales. I lie

and say the other half have not
yet been named. We decide
to call them what makes us
happiest in the moment.

I tell you this is how you were named.
After a bird. I’d like to tell you
the worst I’ve done is run
over a peony

but that sort of lie grows mountainous
What I hope you see
when you’re old enough
to look back at yourself, at us, at me

is anytime you got to see
something for the first time,
nothing was better
than looking at you.

The sea

Yesterday, explaining to my firstborn how the water 
in the pool is different from the water at the beach 
in that there are no fish for him 
to shy away from, I recalled the Hass poem 

where the sea is, ‘almost’, the color of sour milk, 
and I pictured myself years from now explaining to him 
the trouble I had picturing myself as a father. 
I went so far as to leave

out the milk, but there is no method to poetry, 
or children. The real wonder 
of the poem is the almost, how it’s not the sea’s
doing, but the poet’s — a shallow victory.

Evidence

Most of the men in my family are lawyers.

I am a poet 
and a lawyer. 

My father was a judge.

The last time we spoke, twenty plus years ago, 
he was upset about some poems 
I had published. I was upset about him 
refusing to extend my coverage 
under his health care plan. 

The poems implied his absence. 

The insurance card in my wallet 
was evidence to the contrary.

He had me there, I’ll admit, 
but I was unwilling to do so then. 

His last words before I left— 

these are the only two things 
I have left to say 
to your mother and you. 

He was holding up both fists, 
like a wrestler would.

*

In the documentary Beyond the Mat, disgraced wrestling legend
Jake the Snake Roberts visits his estranged father—
they work in the yard—and one of his estranged daughters—
he meets her in a hotel restaurant. 

The wrestler laments his father’s lifelong distance or disinterest 
or even disdain towards him. Then, he admits 
to having become the father he had growing up. 

The older man appears unbothered on screen. 
He says Jake was born out of love.

*

The way that I am a lawyer is that how 
I know best to relate to poetry is how 
lawyers relate to evidence—

What if the poems I wrote about my father’s absence 
were not a denouncement of who he was as a parent, 
but a manifestation of my desire 
to push him out of my life, 
regardless of the parent he was?

What if he was holding up his hands in frustration, 
or disbelief, 
and I chose to see fists?

*

At present, Jake the Snake is again being featured 
on national television. He looks better now 
than he did twenty plus years ago, 
when the documentary was filmed. 

This is unusual in pro wrestling, 
as the brutal toll of in-ring work weighs heavily 
upon aging men and women. 

At some point, performers cross a threshold 
where if it weren’t for their catchphrases,
signature moves, or emblematic costumes, 
it would be hard to recognize them, 

which makes doing so oh so painful.

*

Evidence? —

I can’t prove it,
but I think I would have walked away
even if his hands had gone up in frustration
or disbelief.

Even if they had been reaching out for me.

—

Evidence? —

I can’t say 
if my father looks any better now
than he did then, 
but I look more like him
every day.

Light & color

North Central Florida, 1997

The Klan was supposed to march the next day one town over
and I was printing flyers for a counter protest with a classmate
I swore I was in love with. She was a ‘non-traditional’ student,
because she was married, and older, and worked full time. The husband
had a neck tattoo of a mauve butterfly. I would not see her naked until
three years later when she showed me pictures her husband’s friend
had taken at her behest. She had the same butterfly tattoo below her bikini line.
It was him I thought of while looking at the pictures.
Like, who had the idea for matching tattoos in the first place?
And who picked the color? And do butterflies come in that color?
I wouldn’t have called it mauve then but that’s what it was.
I wouldn’t call it love now but that’s what it felt like.
She wanted to know if they were ‘tasteful’. Three years earlier
we had spent half a day in an abandoned car lot between an office supply
and a Dairy Queen yelling at a handful of angry white men.
All the time I was picturing her naked. This is what I wanted to tell her.
Instead, I nodded yes and spoke of the way the light strayed over her body,
Which is not a word I would have used. I barely thought about light then
or color. Mostly I felt anger. And was hell bent on learning its language. Matters
of light and color and I guess desire and longing remained mysteries to me.
When the white men finally tired of us, we ordered a couple of Blizzards
at the Dairy Queen and when the kid at the register refused to serve us,
we yelled at him too. When I think back at the scene, I see mauve all over it.
Her plan was to mail the pictures to a talent agent the husband’s friend recommended.
She eventually divorced and changed her name and joined the army.
In the pictures, she was standing as she usually stood, in a wooded area
behind their student apartment. There was nothing professional
about the photos and that made them more beautiful and therefore, harder
to look at. All through those years I was mostly angry at myself.
If she was ever angry at anyone or anything for longer than the time
it took to chant down a handful of white men she never said.
She had my mother’s name only spelled different.

Poetry like bread

At the community center workshop, the poet who is also a probation officer referred to another student’s work as arresting. We laughed and laughed.
at his expense.

Then the poet who is also a retired riot control agent
— a last minute addition to the group—
introduced himself saying he used to meet lots of poets thru work.

They would say the darndest things in the holding cell,
he said.

In response, the poet who is mother
to a boy she says is lost
to her,
willfully misquoted the famous poem—

Poetry is like bread, easily broken.

Guillermo Rebollo Gil (San Juan, 1979) is a writer, sociologist, translator, and attorney. His publications include poetry in BOMB, Fence, Poetry Northwest, Second Factory and Whale Road Review; literary criticism in Cleveland Review of Books, Tripwire and Annulet. He serves as an 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).