Landscape With Cart and Silence
June 12,1948,one day after Gag Law 53 passed—Puerto Ricans must pledge allegiance to the American flag. To sing, speak, write, or fly a flag for island independence was to risk ten years in prison.
Birds hold their song.
Nothing slithers.
Not a single feather falls.
Lizards tilt their heads,
disappear beneath rocky
caves. All human footprints erased.
Words collect inside
our heads. It is suicide
to speak them aloud.
Crops of sugar cane stand up
to this attempt on our lives.
Struggle to rise.
Fields silenced, emptied
of mango, avocado, calabaza.
The cart in the painting
lies still. All evidence
of hard work, found nowhere.
The sun jumps off
Luquillo, rolls onto the field
of plucked produce. The heat.
Ninety-four and climbing.
Ghost cows in the barns,
phantom horses corral
outside the painting. A bead of sweat
creeps down the artist’s temple,
he wipes it. Trying to make a living
from painting, he says to no one
and colors the sky purple, a quiet
prayer to his country.
Mouths silenced. Who will remember
our stories? One Kapok tree stands
in the foreground,
tall and immovable.
after painting Paisaje del Yunque con Carreta, c. 1948, Juan Antonio Rosado
Quote: Juan Antonio Rosado
The Artist Juan Antonio Rosado Poses for a Portrait
after found photograph of Juan Antonio Rosado
If I had to guess, it’s 1942—Juan sits chairless.
Wears a thin mustache leans into the portrait,
a palette knife tucked into his right hand,
his signature Rosado nose, familial triangular face.
When I look at him, I think grandfather, mi abuelo
but Grandfather Victor, the housepainter, would
never wear this cream-colored shirt with its long
pointed collar. Or don the painter’s signature bowtie.
I imagine Tio Juan knotting it each morning,
how precise he threads each silky end through
and around with his artist fingers, until some
dark-winged bird emerges, nests, atop his buttoned
clavicle. My Grandfather did not own a bowtie,
infused always with his own angry birds. Birds
who pecked and screeched, tore our family open—
wounded as his bitterness and rage flew over all of us.
In the picture, Tio Juan, poses against a sage
background, restless, he cannot bear to be inside
this green box with so many casitas, rain forests,
and coastlines left to paint. Still as a great blue heron,
he draws a shy smile, while his eyes stare at me,
so intense I look away. He sees far, sees close.
I return to his gaze search for any part of me in his face—
yes, my ears sculpted into a similar question mark.
Roxanne Cardona was born in New York City of Puerto Rican heritage and is the author of Caught in the Principal’s Lens, a finalist in 2024 Wheelbarrow Books Poetry Prize. She was a principal/educator in the South Bronx. Her poems appeared in: Frontier Poetry, finalist in 2023 Ekphrastic Poetry Contest and New Voices, Los Angeles Review of LA20, Neologism, Third Wednesday, Willows Wept Review, Naugatuck River Review, The Westchester Review, and elsewhere. Roxanne lives in New Jersey.
January House Literary Journal 
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