El Moro

By David M. de León

The park will remain open during the lapse of appropriations     using recreation fee revenue and donations    Hazardous or dangerous conditions may exist please plan accordingly         Historic Site parks will remain accessible     with basic services to the public     (Restroom Out of Order)

In 1625 the Dutch occupied San Juan for three months but couldn’t take the Castillo San Felipe del Morro. When they retreated they razed the city to the ground. A Spanish victory.

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What fort builders called a “field-of-fire” or a “killing field.” After decommission the field hosted over two hundred trees. Visitors would walk down an avenue of sea pine and coconut palm. In the ‘90s the trees were removed to “protect the historical scene” of the fort. Removing the trees meant: wind. Removing the trees meant: erosion.

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After the Dutch, the English, after the English, the Americans. America you were never medieval but how medieval you have been. Your smiling machine. Your gilded teeth. Your cruise ships and their cargoes. America you’re caught in a stray cat’s jaws. The frogs laugh all night.

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This is where the soldiers fed on island food. This is where the non-native hogs were split and roasted. Where the fat in rinds crackled. Where the fruits were sucked. A plaque shows a man darker than me carrying a bowl of what? The royal palm of borikén carried no coconuts. They must have dreamed it up. They must have imagined the flesh and the milk. In the mud, the fragrant mud, the fragrant mud pink as flesh.

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Don’t cry, brittle bone. Nothing here dies. This is truth, which some would call magic. Is this why the Europeans came and kept coming? Why they dropped their mortars and anchors? Their churches? Is it why the cemetery sits on the lap of the sea?

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A channel cut in the rock of the fort sloshes sewage down around and under, visiting every embankment, delivering to all shit, bidding all shit, spreading in the close air the human flavor and grace. Shit of European, African, Indio, Mestizo, slurried and sloughed together. I felt my bowels pack while walking the walls, felt my intestines swell like a tourist. Felt it as it bade me shit to the mouth of the bay.

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The tourist lavatories were built into storerooms with great wide triangular openings to the air. They overflowed already and there are no appropriations to clean them. The wind takes and scatters the stench to all and everywhere like salt.

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O conquistadores, O walking, shuffling, conquering membranes of shit, disease, and new growth. As the Dutch shat on the Spanish, as the cannons shat on the English, as the soldiers bayonet the shit out of each other.

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El Morro (headland, snout, nose, gall) is not el moro (moor, foreigner, conqueror, dark one). Moorish kingdoms in Spain until 1491. Then, 1492. But look how they are conquered. What Moten calls resistance of the object. Look at your skin, look at your noses, your gall. El Morro, headland of failure, la Mora, bruja, reina of morning, smirks and touches her neck.

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On the walls the wind tries to murder us and we know this is dangerous this is a measure of its love. To not accept this is to pour death in your molds, into the cannisters of your veins, to hold it in like shit.

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Flies dance on the head of a cannon. Dance out a new year. The magi will bring gold, gunpowder, and linseed oil. They pay homage and cackle mirthlessly. They dance that the rocks will pass out and through the bowels of the sea.

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David M. de León is a Puerto Rican writer, academic, and theater artist from New Jersey. Creative work has appeared or is forthcoming in places like The Acentos Review, At Length, Pleiades, Fence, DIAGRAM, Bat City Review, 2River View, and Strange Horizons. He is a Phd candidate at Yale university, where his research is on contemporary book-length works by Black poets. David is also a playwright and a screenwriter.  http://davidmdeleon.com