We’re a fleshy circle of beached bachelorettes, tramp-stamps fading, bent over mini Boursins and Bordeaux brought down from the room on top of a resort on top of a reef:

the garlic-breathed fruit of four thousand years of human habitation, from the good old Aceramics, the Taíno, fluorescing, and tireless reincarnations of colonizers to the new ground-sloths, the new giant island shrew:

you, sunburnt, evolved, sipping rum and corn syrup from a purple plastic penis straw— barbasco to sacred vomit sticksv to Tylenol factories to this sludge-filled veiny verisimilitude— wondering how you landed yourself here:

bridesmaid, la isla, Borinquen, a fortified interrobang trimmed in a Whore-Glo faux-feather boa as Russian businessmen offer you their warm Coronas, when all your life you’ve just been trying to make some progress.