The featured excerpt is “Luna Llena” from My Puerto Rican Past, first published in The Homestead Review, Spring 2003.
Luna Llena
The moon was larger than any we had ever witnessed in Queens, powerful enough to affect more than the ocean's tides, insistent like a prayer repeated into effortless memory, passionate its backdrop as I held you closer than the space between notes of the love song the orchestra was playing. The full moon that night in Puerto Rico promised us an eternity of stars, rum and coke washed nights, as I danced with you, Sylvia, wondering how you could not be mine, since the very sky conspired to convince you happiness would settle upon us like the sea surrounds Luquillo's white sands, if only you would say sí to the arguments of that night's bolero. Instead, I left without you from Fajardo, in tired daylight, back to Long Island, where no one really believes how yellow, how immense, how insistent the moonlight matters to anything as important as what perished that lost, lunar night: the youth to believe your body's grace could not lie to us, the innocence to expect a moon that wise, that full, could never be wrong.
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