Graduation
- Jun 17, 2022
- 1 min read
by Guillermo Rebollo-Gil
For a few months after the student strike, this cop and I would run into each other in Walgreens, at the gas station. The first couple of times he would ask hey, weren’t you one of the… I had answered yes, the very first time.
One day, he called me by my name, asked if I had graduated already. Another day, I walked out the store to find him smoking next to my car.
One thing we would do to cops during the strike was shame them into looking away from us, standing in front of them, arm in arm. For all the days upon days we spent staring into officers’ eyes, I wouldn’t recognize any of their faces.
At some point, I started driving a longer way for gas.
At graduation, somebody said if only the pigs could see us now. How we shamed them was by asking how come they never made it to college.
Guillermo Rebollo-Gil (San Juan, 1979) is a writer, sociology professor, translator, and attorney. Recent, and forthcoming, publications include poetry in Pacifica Literary Review, Poetry Northwest, Second Factory, HAD and trampset; prose in Sleet and Jellyfish Review; scholarly articles in Journal of Autoethnography and Liminalities. Book-length translations include I’ll Trade you this Island (2018) by Cindy Jiménez-Vera and Recetas Naturales para el Mundo Fenomenal (2017) by Sommer Browning. His book-length essay, Writing Puerto Rico: Our Decolonial Moment (2018), was published by Palgrave Macmillan in their New Caribbean Studies Series. He belongs to/with Lucas Imar and Ariadna Michelle. Happily so.
