Nicole Arocho Hernández is the author of the poetry chapbook “I Have No Ocean” (Sundress Publications, 2021). Their poems can also be found in The Acentos Review, Electric Literature, Honey Literary, West Branch, The Academy of American Poets, and elsewhere. Their work has been supported by the Hambidge Center, Tin House, and The Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing, among others. They currently live in Puerto Rico, where they are a caregiver.

“sonnet of the starless night” is written after “Soneto de las estrellas,” (Sonnet of the Stars) by Esteban Valdés, a Puerto Rican visual artist and poet. Valdés’ concrete sonnet is composed of two quartets and two tercets with eleven stars in each line. Valdés published the first book of concrete poetry in Puerto Rico, Fuera de Trabajo (Out of Work, 1977), which highly influences my approach to image-text and other visual approaches to poetry. My sonnet erasure wrestles with language as a tool of oppression, erasure via a colonizer language, and what is hiding/working behind the erasure. Here erasure tries to subvert but it is ultimately consumed by itself. At the end of English, there is complicit silence. This poem wouldn’t exist without Ricardo Maldonado.

“untrussed, and yet” is an excerpt from a chapbook-length image-text poem wrestling with how a colonized subject tries, again and again, to move outside of the identity, history, allegiance, language, and desires carved by imperial indoctrination and assimilation. The visuals are all mine. This poem wouldn’t exist without Muriel Leung.