The Puerto Rican Literature Project

I started writing on a day 

when I still carried over my chest

the cold from the operating room. 

The mountain 

of Tylenol with codeine would not be enough

I wrote

so I would not drown in the tears

I was spitting out in the darkest of the night. 

I wrote poems with no ending

with no beginning

—scraps—

of thoughts. 

They scattered over the paper

stamped

like scars

that open and reopen 

with every reading. 

To buffer the metal from my falls, I travel. 

My bones break and come together again

countless times. 

Sometimes I have no choice 

but to return home

to find the wheelchair.

Bones take all the time they want to heal. 

You don’t know when to stop, my father says. 

Yet I always go out again. 

I fill the notebooks with landscapes, villages, 

painted doors, 

subway stations,

deserts, and other seas. 

I fall in love more with cities

than with men. 

Although I also become lost

often in those as well, 

through streets, trains, and bodies. 

I do not regret it. 

I live with the zeal of my own laughter. 

The invisible abysses on the sidewalks,

the near falls, do not affect my sleep. 

I re-read old notebooks.

Historical archives of other Gabrielas

whom I have also been. 

Pages full of poems with no ending

with no beginning

—scraps—

of thoughts,

illusions, 

frustrations,

of many accomplishments. 

I also open and reopen myself

with every reading.