The first governor of Puerto Rico was American. He took things. His people stay alive this way. He moved money to American-owned sugar plantations. Then he went home and started the largest sugar syndicate in the world. Once, it was called The American Sugar Refining Company. Today, it’s called Domino Sugar. In your kitchen, there was a big yellow bin of Domino Sugar.

by Giovannai Rosa

Winner, Elinor Benedict Poetry Prize, selected by Yanyi

We lived with you once, before the shelter,
emptied at your door with our obvious want,
I stood beneath the oak limbs soft with lichen,
imagining the film of Ma swallowing herself,
begging in the dim light, until you held me
briefly in the dark curves of your eyes, neglect
was a language, a legacy scooped from your mouth,
and I was something temporary, bent in fear,
slogging through your smell, your dark frown,
that Spanish in your mouth spreading a sea
between us, your silver speech pouring over
my head, muting the room, your voice
only a texture, the TV light shaping your face
as you sat there with a mouth full of sugar,
Ma in the amber kitchen stirring her coffee
in a circle, her hands going back to the sugar,
my hands tracing the white maze of mundillo
lace beneath the plastic, a woman from the state
was coming to ask me questions, I looked again
and the maze didn’t exist, I found Ma softening
as she stood above you, my body wading in Spanish,
something like an apology, a confession, maybe
she was asking you for more, shame was a ghost
beginning to glitter in front of us, I vanished
to find the honey morning light, velvet atop
the maples, dense in their ceremony of color,
and there, someone in the distance levitating,
isn’t that mine too, a little miracle to leave

Giovannai Rosa is a writer, editor, and artist from Miami. They’re the winner of the 2022 Ploughshares Emerging Writer’s Award in poetry, and have work housed in Oxford American, The Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day series, The Offing, and more. They’re a 2022 Periplus Fellow, a 2023 Tin House Scholar, and an inaugural Tin House Reading Fellow. They’re pursuing their MFA as a Kelly Miller Fellow in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. Find them at giovarosa.com.