Image: Unsplash, downloaded (https://unsplash.com/photos/a-white-line-in-the-sky-FQsbpWYY_M8) 12. 10. 2024.
Seagull Is Not a Bird
Seagull is a sign
Seagull is a memory
Seagull is an incantatory vision
Seagull is a witness to still unacknowledged atrocities
Seagull is an uncanny moment, then another
Seagull is a blue bird at the center of a Hermes scarf gifted from a father who was rarely home
Seagull is a deep connection to a beloved friend detoxing from heroin again
Seagull is a journey toward Nono’s Nazi incarceration
Seagull is an inkling seeking peace with his being forgotten
Seagull is the memory of him hiding in the recesses of my nervous system, in that place where the unnamed remains unspoken, feeding dreams
Seagull is a long-delayed dialogue with the dead
Seagull is a silent six-year-old sister
Seagull is a silver mobile in the corner of a teenager’s bedroom
Seagull is a silhouette painted into a geometric sunset, though somehow not banal
Seagull is a New Age icon named Jonathan in a book where all the birds are gendered male
Seagull is then also an unwitting exclusion, a dated oversight
Seagull is a literary allusion like an albatross, a raven, many vultures, a broken-winged bird, flying Africans, a lode-star
Seagull is a message flying inland announcing ensuing hurricane
Seagull is traces of diasporic longing
Seagull is stripped of social trappings
Seagull is an ethical imperative, as all relations
And yet seagull is none of these
For seagull is first and foremost its own existence
Poem published in a peer-reviewed Caribbean Studies journal, Sargasso (special issue on Prison Camps and Guantánamo. 2021-22. I & II.).
About the Author: Maritza Stanchich, Ph.D., is Professor of English at University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras, where she teaches Puerto Rican diaspora, Latinx, Caribbean and American literatures. Her scholarship on William Faulkner, Puerto Rican diaspora literature, and the crisis at UPR, has been published in refereed journals and books. In 2020, she and Hilda Lloréns won the LASA-Puerto Rico Section Blanca G. Silvestrini Prize for Outstanding Article in Puerto Rican Studies. Her columns for The Huffington Post, The New York Times and The Guardian helped bring international attention to Puerto Rico’s crisis. Her book of translated articles, De huelga a pandemia en Puerto Rico: una década de intervenciones periodísticas internacionales, is due out this year (Editora Educación Emergente). A long-time activist, she worked for academic unionization at University of California and with the Asociación Puertorriqueña de Profesores Universitarios. Raised in New Jersey, of Croatian and Peruvian descent, she has lived in San Juan for 25 years. Her father Ferruccio Stanchich, born in Rijeka (Fiume) and raised in Istria, emigrated as a refugee to New York in 1953 with his mother Giovanna nee Terkovich, rejoining her husband Antonio Stanchich, who later died in a car accident in 1967. This poem is for him.
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