S. Salazar

“I’m trying to piece my future together from fragments,” S. explains in a poem in her debut collection, Raíces, Relics, and Other Ghosts. In these poems, she airs out her mix of identities as that box of family relics and Abuela’s recipes and flower-knowledge, the “stem lodged in things/left long ago” through generations of “Isolation! Erasure! Assimilation!” And yet, as she works at those mementos, like “rusted Rosary beads,” the old Boricua is still alive slipping in between Spanish and Inglesa and “Gandules, guava, plátanos, sofrito, sazón, /take root and transform” “open in the in-between” mind “something real,/something loosening” until that tresillo of “molasses cookies /and almond cakes alongside Abuela’s pollo guisado/y arroz con gandules” starts to melt in the mouth and that rhythm takes root, never arriving, always “practicando, growing into places”, “healing so it no longer hurts to hold.”