Raquel Salas Rivera
Roque Salas Rivera (he/they) is a poet, translator, and editor from Mayagüez, Puerto Rico. In 2018, he was named poet laureate of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Rivera is the author of several collections of poetry, including x/ex/exis (University of Arizona Press, 2021), which won the 2018 Ambroggio Prize and lo terciario / the tertiary (Timeless, Infinite Light, 2018, and Noemi Press, 2019), which was longlisted for the 2018 National Book Award and won a 2018 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Poetry. Rivera is the coeditor of La piel del arrecife: Antología de poesía trans puertorriqueña (approximately translated “The Skin of the Reef: An Anthology of Puerto Rican Trans Poetry”) (La Impresora & Atarraya Cartonera, 2023), and Puerto Rico en mi corazón (Anomalous Press, 2019), a collection of contemporary Puerto Rican poets. Rivera earned a PhD in comparative literature and literary theory from the University of Pennsylvania, and he lives, teaches, and writes in Puerto Rico. With a three-year grant from the Mellon Foundation, they worked as investigator and head of the translation team for El proyecto de la literatura puertorriqueña/The Puerto Rican Literature Project (PLPR), a free, bilingual, user-friendly and open access digital portal that anyone can use to learn about and teach Puerto Rican poetry. Source
if time is queer/and memory is trans/and my hands hurt in the cold/then
there are ways to hold pain like night follows day
not knowing how tomorrow went down.
it hurts like never when the always is now,
the now that time won't allow.
there is no manner of tomorrow, nor shape of today
only like always having to leave
from and toward the future's could-be,
in order to never more see
the sí;
and if forever proves me wrong,
it'll hurt with the hurt of before the before.
it'll have to take me along:
all the never-enough of why and therefore.
life has given me much to believe,
but more is the doubt that undid what i know,
for, like night follows day, the pleasure is sure,
of forever beginning once more.
Published:
2020
Length:
Regular
Literary Movements:
Contemporary
Anthology Years:
2025
Themes:
Doubt & Fear
LGBTQ+ Experience
Memory & The Past
Literary Devices:
Anadiplosis
A device in which the last word or phrase of one clause, sentence, or line is repeated at the beginning of the next.
Antanaclasis
The repetition of a word within a phrase, in which the second use of the word utilizes a different and sometimes contrary meaning from the first.
End Rhyme
when a poem has lines ending with words that sound the same
Idiom
a phrase or expression that typically presents a figurative, non-literal meaning attached to the phrase
Internal Rhyme
A rhyme involving a word in the middle of a line and another at the end of the line or in the middle of the next.
Metaphor
a comparison between two unrelated things through a shared characteristic
Repetition
a recurrence of the same word or phrase two or more times
Simile
a comparison between two unlike things using the words “like” or “as”
Surrealism
a style of art and literature in which ideas, images, and objects are combined in a strange, dreamlike way.