NYU Black Renaissance Noire Summer/Fall 2010 | Page 7

p
Excerpted from the forthcoming book
of poems and prose, In the Shadow of
Al-Andalus, to be published by Coffee
House Press in 2011.

Moroccan
Mint Layla

by VICTOR HERNANDEZ CRUZ

1

I waswas sailing in the rivers of
looking
for something that

6

my blood, an echo in the lecture of history,
something in the stream of guitar strings, plenera
percussions of my Puerto Rico, something
within the bolero of my mother — the perfume
that meanders out of a book.

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