I began making resolutions*

To sit outside for thirty minutes with a notebook
and draw a bird. To learn to describe the animal:
It looks the same as the others
around it. It’s brown. It looks nothing like
the ones people post pictures of.

To go on a bird walk. Though, frankly, it’s impossible
to get by around here without a car. Birds,
I have been told, are smarter than we once believed.
          Praise be
to thoughtlessness, for I am innocent
of ever believing a single wrong thing about a bird. 

To repeat release until I feel lifted
yet grounded. To be okay with giving up.
To learn to describe the way I look
most like myself after I cry.

*from Robert Hass

Guillermo Rebollo Gil (San Juan, 1979) is a poet, sociologist, translator and attorney. His poems have appeared, or are forthcoming, in Fence, Second Factory, Pacifica Literary Review, Trampset, and Trampoline, among others. 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.