You, in your deep Brooklyn accent,
your Bronx swagger, Jersey sway. I love you like a mother—
you, wearing headphones dancing in your living room
to house, freestyle, a little Hector Lavoe,
cuatros careening playfully alongside Puerto Rican accordions,
Rafael Hernandez, Godfather to us all. I love you like a mother,
bomba y plena, feet conversing with drums,
circling the universe in a shimmy. I love you,
the way you dream up fincas, a farm where you retire,
smelling like sofrito stirred into arroz con gandules. Did I birth you?
Because I love you like Mami loves the reina in me. You—
unbreakable caldero
with a little garlic and onion sizzling in the steel center.
I love you like I love tender pernil—no like crispy cuero,
the best part of the pork that crunches under our teeth
melting on our tongues.
I love us in all our cool sticky sweetness, piragua
sold at a cart in Humboldt Park, my uncle pouring
a little tamarindo syrup over shaved ice.

And your smile.
I love your smile, like how a mother gazes upon her daughter
proud of the bandera that flies in between her hands
proud we smell salty, ocean water
drenching our curly hair with a little bit of side eye.

I love you.
The way I love the humid green of El Yunque,
rainforest water bathing our bodies in Borinquen.
I love your city green too,
pots sitting on your NYC balcony,
sun shining down, rising deep green stretching its way up.

I love you
even when your English is not very good looking.
I love us, colonized children searching for libertad—
pa’lante, siempre pa’lante.
Sometimes humans, always second class citizens
searching for gold-paved American roads.
I love us:
jíbaros and mancha de plátano.
Jíbaro does not mean dumb and when you see the pava
trust it means we are muy orgulloso
demanding, insisting respect.

We are the men
who migrated to the mainland looking for work.
We are single mothers
practicing magic in cramped apartments.

I love us.

We are the children who watch our abuelas at the stove,
writing down measurements as oil flies from the frying pan.
We are the gardeners who grow hibiscus in backyards
watching hummingbirds flit past.
All of us searching for Puerto Rico’s sweet nectar.

I love us, head bent before an altar,
pictures of tías and tíos in small frames,
lit candles for the living and the dead,
singed palo santo smoking the air.

I love us even as our bodies double,
one an island,
the other the States,
both embracing culture birthed from decades
of worship and memory
passed down mouth to mouth, all of us
bonded by ancestral lineage
something that sounds like singing in the air

or wait—
it sounds a little more like
barbed wire:
resistance.

Ysabel Y. González, a Newark, New Jersey native, is producer for poetry and social impact at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center and curates the Dodge Poetry Festival. She is a CantoMundo fellow, a Pushcart Prize nominee, and the author of Wild Invocations and Sing This Body Out.

This poem was selected by September poetry curator Leslie McIntosh, who writes: “González’s ‘I Love You Like a Mother: For Nuyorico’ closes this folio out of the folds of elegies from lost pasts into an ode for the ‘magic of cramped apartments’ and ‘pots sitting on your NYC balcony’ of a blessed now. How the specificity of event and artifact elevated the poem’s deep attention from refrain—’I love…’—to prayer. What do we summon by naming our love so clearly while it yet exists in this world? The similes of this poem tell us: sanctuary—the baby cousin of home. We can be mothers to our own oases of return—the gift of diaspora. The linkages ‘bonded by ancestral lineage’ are alive in the here and now, whether on American or Puerto Rican soil, except in the final line of the poem. There, we’re offered one of the few unambiguous metaphors of the poem. Something so grand and simple, it reaches beyond what can be said.”