Sofía Córdova, born in Carolina, Puerto Rico, and currently based in Oakland, is an artist whose work considers sci-fi, dance and music culture(s), the internet, mystical objects, colonial contamination, extinction, migration, and climate change under the conditions of late capitalism and its technologies.

presidente ni qué presidente

I am no president.

 And I want 

no president. 

If I'm even to consider

 this idea 

of president, 

It is 

to consider

Its end. 

The end to that shining and new

 gleaming evil 

spirit

That rides

The bodies of men who are

 Dying of thirst

Who, hunger, thirst, 

salivate rivers

For power.

I refuse, renounce

 this “President” 

The Ghost of a club 

exclusive and shadowy 

beyond my 

Our 

wildest conspiratorial imaginings. 

I refuse renounce 

the citizenship

he gave 

Me and Puerto Rico

Without my, our asking 

when he took the shape of Woodrow Wilson 

to summon us to the trenches. 

I refuse renounce 

the shape

he took when

no one ran to sign up and

he invented the draft and 

20,000 troops were sucked into the sea

 to guard that gash on the earth

 hewn by the USA, The Panama canal. 

The rest of them skidded over the waves

 Farther

 in the opposite direction 

to certain death 

along 

the Western Front.

After that war, 

 with the next war,

he tightened his grip.

3 olympian manacles 

on

3 pressure points 

around 

the body of the island.

Roosevelt Roads for Poseidon

Buchanan for Hades

Ramey for  Zeus 

I know because 

I went 

to school 

There, underwater. 

From where

 the bombing of Vieques 

was carried out.

I know

because I went on a field trip

to the

Command center 

that launched the 

ordinances.

And the man said,

Finger on the map,

“This here is where we drop the bombs.” 

That went on until 2003

Now, don’t misunderstand

 la Reina y El Primer Ministro 

were our original 

President and 

I would 

undo them

 too. They started

All of this.

Followed by 

James Monroe, 

William

 McKInley, 

Teddy 

Roosevelt. 

All their paths

crossings

over mine 

In between dark centuries

Over waves roiling

or maybe,

placidly lapping 

the shores

of the Caribbean and Atlantic, 

Ocean and Sea. 

As Fire screamed on the water

between

 Cuba and 

Puerto Rico,

McKinley

screamed too 

shattering crystal

“Remember the Maine! To Hell 

With Spain!” while 

handpicking

bright colonies for the Republic’s crown.

Relying on the hard work 

of free 

and runaway slaves,

the work of theTaíno 

 the work of the poor, 

to rid us of Spain and its own crown.

The president takes and takes and takes and takes and takes. 

land

oil 

cotton

sugar 

buys it 

 with blood.

Drip and drained

during a class war 

 or just stolen.

That’s how he

 crashes into 

the lives and wishes and desires and dreams 

Of the descendants of Africa and Asia 

and all the tribes of 

of all the lands in the Americas and 

Elsewhere too

forever and ever and ever and ever

 and now

And in 1898 as my Tatarabuela Matilde hung clothes out to dry over a bluff overlooking the sea, and saw his ships roll in to never leave again. 

This is how our unholy bind came to be. 

600 years and counting

of not belonging to ourselves.

At first some welcomed The President, 

But the president never has cared for

 really cared for, black, indigenous, poor people.

His care begins and ends

 with surmising their abilities as 

sugar cane workers 

and pharmaceutical factory workers 

cleaning up toxic sludge,

and waiters who carry

 little dumb drinks to you on the beach. 

Small revolts happened in those days

strikes from 

workers 

impassioned writings  

taking up where Betances and Hostos had left off

In their on open battle

With colony and 

Empire

 Pedro Albizu Campos too led island uprisings for decades and decades

 to try to exorcise 

The President

and his coozing spirit. 

In the end, 

he was left to live life in prison 

Where he died

Mocked and poisoned. 

Harry Truman then FDR

 were at the time

  being ridden by the spirit of The President

when he squashed all that surrounded

 and came behind 

Albizu Campos.

With bombing raids in the mountains of Utuado. 

Can you even imagine that?

 Being forced into citizenship, 

 and as citizen, being bombed? 

You can if you’re black and American

 because if you know you know

What happened in Philly

 on Mother’s day 

in 1985.

The arm of The President that carried all this out

moved swiftly 

carelessly

south 

through the alician winds

taking the shape of an American police chief,

with bloody crust under his nails

named Francis E Riggs 

who was the son of Riggs National Bank, a bank with colonial investments to protect in the region.

The bank eventually got dismantled 

when they were caught laundering for Augusto Pinochet, 

that macabre piece of rot placed in power by The President.

The very one who let lose bombs 

over Utuado and Jayuya

swoosh bang, 

through the cordillera central and into the quaint streets of Ponce 

to kill the threat to property and power. 

When the pictures of the Ponce massacre came out

it is now known

they were staged

bodies moved 

around

To make it look like the nationalists had attacked the police

The NYT reported it that way.

Albizu Campos went to jail again 

And forever

 when 

Lolita Lebron got arrested in Washington 

for demanding our liberty.

Do you know how awful

 it feels to be propelled 

forward along

 the tidy arc

 of history

 pushed on by thwarted revolution?

One day 

I might, in my own way

 change that

And end your President

Even if it’s

the one

That took up residence

 in my head.

End Bush, Trump, + Obama

(Who invented PROMESA to pay back capitalists who 

Picked at our already picked thru bones).

I wish and work on his departure from 

the land that bore me 

and before me held the slaves

 that became me on my way to him

after a perilous and

 cruel journey

To that other coast.

From the land that bore the Taínos who have always been me

 because they’ve been with the earth

 i love so fiercely

from almost the beginning. 

I renounce, refuse

 The President 

and his folding 

Crumbling

Destroyable 

Power

May the people of my island 

And the  people of the United States 

And all the other islands still held

As ‘territories’

find freedom

 from his tyranny

 and find air 

To breathe

in the masses 

Of the descendants of Africa and Asia 

and all the tribes of 

of all the lands in the Americas and 

Elsewhere too that live there now 

that make it

 a place

That could become

 free of the ghost

Of a thousand ships 

And of a billion deaths.