FLORICANTO ISSUE Rich Villar   ALWAYS HERE lacking a proper entrance into a poem about Arizona Senate Bill 1070 prompts me instead to tell you about the flamboyanes blooming in Doña Yeya's mouth every time she speaks about her children, or the pasteles that do not wrap themselves until blood is offered to the masa, or the boys she sent to Germany, who came back headless and quoting Bible verses or the girls with thirteen years of bruises at the hands of those same boys who were told asi es la vida without the slightest sense of irony who shouldered Nuyorican babies dutifully to Bayamón dreaming about a nation under which they cannot legally claim citizenship or parrandas of gold stomping flat the Jersey snow forgetting that coquito never meant cold weather or the act of forgetting beneath every aguinaldo, because civil cafesito and politics cannot coexist and we do not question our birth certificates unless we are agents of Homeland Security because we were born American citizens and as such are eligible to die at a higher rate in exchange for houses in Orlando that we do not own. There are Puerto Ricans in Arizona and New York and Nebraska and, I promise you, good gente, it makes no difference if your grandmother conjures Michoacan or Mayaguez in her flowered breath, it makes no difference if you bless the four winds or pray to San Juan Bautista, to those who only see papers and brown flesh, who cannot locate your cities on the maps of conquerors or conquered, you are a threat, and if this is the case, gente, I say, be a threat.  Unquieted, bloom where you are not permitted to bloom.  Disjointed, walk anywhere you please, stumble if you must, but be present. And when they ask you where you keep your company, tell them here, here, always here. credits Rich Villar is the executive director of the Acentos Foundation, an organization committed to building audiences and communities around Latino/a literature, and he facilitates its weekly poetry workshop in the Bronx.  His work has appeared in Rattapallax, MiPoesias, Ocho, Achiote Seeds, and Amistad. He was the co-curator and host of the Floricanto in DC reading, in protest of Arizona Senate Bill 1070, in February 2011.   Published in Volume 13, Number 1, Winter 2012.