Animals: “Coquí Becomes a Revolutionary Bullet” by Nicole Arocho Hernández

Coquí Becomes a Revolutionary Bullet

for centuries, I have lived
innumerable songs

died the most humiliating deaths
became a nation’s lullaby

forced to migrate
became another’s nightmare

I am small in comparison
and yet you have nothing

that could tempt me
into signing away my freedom

I have not your hands
nor grotesque language

all I have is this endangered melody 
this call for liberation

so I kiss my smallness

and offer it to you my people

let me be thunder
in their pristine hollow halls

let me jump on their lifeless 
whitewashed walls and proclaim

I did not come to kill anyone
I came to die for Puerto Rico

let my echo haunt
their derisive acts of fealty

to a murderous nation

Author’s note

"I am small in comparison" is borrowed from Truong Tran's The Book of the Other. "I did not come to kill anyone / I came to die for Puerto Rico" was said by Puerto Rican nationalist leader Lolita Lebrón after being arrested for being a part of the 1954 Congressional Shooting.

About Nicole Arocho Hernández

Nicole Arocho Hernández grew up in Cabo Rojo, Puerto Rico. Her poems have been published in The Acentos Review, Electric Literature, The Academy of American Poets, and elsewhere. Her chapbook, I Have No Ocean, was published by Sundress Publications. She is the recipient of the 2021 Katherine C. Turner Prize, a nomination for the Pushcart Prize, and was named a finalist for the 2022 Black Warrior Review Poetry Prize. She is the Translations Editor at Hayden’s Ferry Review and an MFA candidate at Arizona State University.