By Roque Salas Rivera

treatment belongs to water.
it designates the sum of all relations one has with another.
you might say the life schemed between two is treatment.
to treat water is to cure it for consumption, but your
treatment speaks volumes about your desire to bear witness.

to treat you like water, i’d have to assume you
as essential and daily.
i aspire to this when i fall in love, that you be my water.
since we are both from here, we are a bit
contaminated, which treatment must consider.

i treat you like an island looks at another
and understands water is power.
i know i’m mixing things, but treatment
is the mixture of all the things
we did to each other when they took our land,
cut down our forests
and distributed our crops.

it isn’t a metaphor when i say crop.
sometimes it’s a metaphor when i talk about us and water.
it’s easy to get confused with so much barnacle language
stuck to our wall.

confusion is a way of getting close.
i come close, fail, and fall in love.

treatment is the sum of all relations had
with each person i knew on this island.
each i loved, to a greater or lesser degree.
if they hurt me or took my shirt,
they are still part of the treaty we signed.

Poet Bio

Roque Salas Rivera was born in Puerto Rico and currently lives in Philadelphia. Of their work, informed by Leftist politics as well as Spanish language literary traditions, Rivera has said, “There are poems like solidarities. This is the most ideal case. It makes people reach out to me, like after a reading, when I write something and other Boricuas are like, ‘This poem about the debt made me cry.’ When I see them cry, and they’re thanking me for writing it, that’s not just a poem. It becomes larger than itself. It becomes an interaction in the world, which is doing a kind of political work.” They are the 2018–19 poet laureate of Philadelphia and a co-organizer of the festival We (Too) Are Philly. See More By This Poet

More By This Poet