Still We Stand

San Antonio, Texas

Still we stand. Not so you.

Not on a stone pedestal.

Not visible from Martin Street.

Not overlooking land you never reached.

In a basement you now languish.

Breeches, scroll, doublet, and cloak

bronze like me, stained spray paint-red.

Does it remind you of San Domingo?

Or make you remember your chains?

Feel the metal our ancestors felt,

tight and cold against bronze skin.

Forget your Niña and your Pinta.

Forget your Santa Maria.

Guanahaní and Ayiti we remember.

And erect tall the Taíno.

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Jonathan Fletcher holds a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from Columbia University.  A Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, he won Northwestern University Press’s Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize in 2023, for which he will have his debut chapbook, This is My Body, published in 2025