Names for Wrestlers
- Jun 30, 2021
- 1 min read
by Guillermo Rebollo-Gil
The child wants to know who’s that on my shirt, an occasion his mother had warned me about.
I could call him a heel, but my friends the poets have advised against using wrestling terms
in my poems without defining them first. I could say he’s a friend but dead wrestlers
aren’t my friends so much as my role models?
His mother asks, smiling.
Personal prompts for sorrow, I reply. Take Bruiser Brody, for instance.
Stabbed in a locker room shower by a rival, he bled out while clutching a picture of his son.
Is that the lesson? He will one day ask of me, my dear child, I’ve learned whatever makes you sad
belongs to you. You will at times act not out of softness but out of whatever makes of people rivals. I wish
you never become a rival to yourself. A heel is whoever looks to hurt others as much as he hurts himself.
Is he pain? He asks now on account of the expression on Brody’s face on my shirt. Yes, child, this is Pain.
Guillermo Rebollo-Gil (San Juan, 1979) is a poet, sociologist and attorney. His poems have appeared, or are forthcoming, in Fence, Mandorla, The Acentos Review , Pittsburgh Poetry Journal, FreezeRay and Caribbean Writer. His book-length essay Writing Puerto Rico: Our Decolonial Moment (2018), a careful consideration of the potentialities of radical thought and action in contemporary Puerto Rico, was published by Palgrave Macmillan in their New Caribbean Studies Series. He belongs to/with Lucas Imar and Ariadna Michelle. Happily so.
