mipoesias american cuban issue

March 2008

ISSN 1543-6063 www.MIpoeSIaS.coM

aMerIcaNcubaNISSueSpecial Guest editor: emma TrelleS

March 2008 Volume 22, Issue 3

p o e T r y

4 GrISel y. acoSTa Dream Water Breath Death • Holographic Glitter • Concentric Circles

7 rIch vIllar 174th Street • Ode to Henry Kissinger • Definitions

11 elISa albo Baby, I Love Your Way • Hatikva • Getting Out of the Kitchen and On With Your Life

14 eMMa TrelleS How to Write A Poem: Theory #62 • What Would Have Happened if I Had Married You • In an Alcove Between the Beacon and the Avalon • Autumn Unexpected

16 SaNdra caSTIllo Quickening Days • This is What Happens When I Fall Asleep

20 vIrGIl Suarez La Madre del Agua • Balsero/Rafter • Blue Cuban • Moon

22 SuzaNNe frISchkorN Letra • What It Means to be Cuban, Hyphenated • Clerestory Sky • Samhain

24 achy obejaS May First • 3 Stories

25 huGo rodrIGuez C-Shift • D.O.A • The Gods of Rescue

26 MIa leoNIN When I Arrive • Unraveling the Bed • Aparicion de la Virgen • A Miami Story

30 keMel zaldIvar Poem • Apostrophes to the Sky • How to Read Dick Case

31 adrIaN caSTro Handling Destiny: On Crossing Borders • Handling Destiny: Tools of the Trade • The Fickle Nature of Friendship

40 dIeGo QuIroS The Sun • Superfluous Touch (while riding the metro) • Wind

42 krISTINa MarTINez The Escape Artist Otherwise Known as Our Lady of Charity • Fit of Cypress on the Dirt Hill

45 rITa MarIa MarTINez Reading Jane Eyre • Jane Eyre’s Fashion Remedy • Saint John Rivers Pops the Question on Jane Eyre

48 dulce MeNeNdez Miami • How To Paint A Cuban Dream

50 carIdad MccorMIck Puta • Quinceñera • Erosion

52 rIchard blaNco New Orleans Sestina Against Order • Even if the Sun Explodes • Looking for the Gulf Motel, Marco Island, Florida

r e v I e w S

17 oScar hIjueloS, rhyThM kING Kirk Curnutt reviews Oscar Hijuelos’s Rhythm King.

34 The INveNTIoN of SkIN: love, MaGIc aNd MIracle IN MIa leoNIN’S poeTry Michael Parker reviews Mia Leonin’s Unraveling the Bed.

44 MIcro-revIew Julie R. Enszer on Achy Obejas’s chapbook This is What Happened in Our Other Life.

froNT cover The Ecstasy of St Theresa (Diego Quiros) is about the moment just prior to making love. The actual moment of ecstasy in lovemaking is captured inside the triangle, which marks the transition between this world and the other. The triangle represents the vulva, and the angelic symbols written around its border represent creation, the doorway to giving life. The arrow on top is Cupid’s arrow about to strike. The flowers are Angel’s Trumpets, which, much like making love, are highly intoxicating and are sometimes ingested for recreational or shamanic intoxication. The painting is a combination of the Bernini sculpture, a model from a Victoria’s Secret catalog, and the painter’s own attempts at experiencing small moments of divinity through the body of another.

For more information on and the latest guidelines for MiPOesias, please stop by www.mipoesias.com.

When MiPO publisher Didi

Menendez first asked me to edit

the American-Cuban issue, I had

some particular ideas about the

poems I wanted to include. Mostly,

these thoughts were a list of what

I wanted to avoid. I did not wish to

publish odes to a palm-rich island.

I did not want to read about ripe

mangos or assimilation or the one

suitcase everyone crammed their

lives into when they fled from the

revolution. I thought the American-

Cuban poet was now beyond the

tropical motifs and the ever-present

contemplation of the past. It was

our time to show we could write widely; we were not hyphenated poets compelled by our histories, but

simply writers working our craft in fresh ways. And I was right. And I was wrong.

The 18 poets in this issue of MiPO showed me that we are still telling our stories, and there is no tale

without a beginning. Where we come from is as vital to our lives as blood and air. Yet the poems on these

pages frequent the past as readily as the present, or even the imagined, and they are all places filled with

remarkable voices. They tell of road trips to New Orleans and Key West, of the resurrection of Jane Eyre,

of the deities we pray to and for whom we light candles. At times these poems are not narrative but lyric,

floating freely between dreams and cities, between the the moon and the harvest. Some voices speak

for the those who can no longer be heard, the ones who did not survive the desperate ocean passage

between fascism and freedom.

The late Cuban poet, writer and dissident Reinaldo Arenas once noted that his people were defined by

noise because Cubans can neither enjoy nor suffer in silence. We must be heard. So it goes with the

poems in this issue. They are insistent and fierce. They make a fine noise.

Emma Trelles

l e T T e r f r o M T h e e d I T o r

march 2008 mipo | 3

DiDi MenenDez’ portraits bring out the

poem in the poet.

see more portraits at the American Poet Portrait Collection

americanpoets.blogspot.com

Holographic Glitter…on my eyes, when snow is between my toes and platform shoes.I can’t go on begging in subzero weather,laughing at how dead disco jealous you areas green absinthe creeps out of my teeth and nailswhen you try to hurt me with weave-wearing women.

Blistered bruises…

…on my feet and calves after sweat dancing ‘til last call.I can’t go on strutting into broken glass liquor rooms,dancing on the egos of spit in your hair photo girlsas the Carib maraca DJ and I become one wax groovewhen everyone else is wishing for the radio mix.

Lit formaldehyde…

…in my mouth, when forgotten family history is buried under party loft slats.I can’t go on crawling in hazy stupid stupor on futons and old cereal,floating between kill the dendrites and pronunciato memoria,as Julia de Burgos and Nicolas Guillen simultaneously dare mewhen I thought I’d taken every dare and come out the brave one.

Dust crusted DNA…

…in my veins and saliva as outbursts burn inside once motionless eardrums.I can’t go on silencing greatgrandmotherfathers with vinegar bandages,squeezing down faces tree branches with dead air culture,as I hear what could be a stifled whimper that says, “danceshinespeak.”When my voice and body and ancestry merge, the color is ecstasy.

march 2008 mipo | 5

…on my eyes, when snow is between my toes and platform shoes.I can’t go on begging in subzero weather,laughing at how dead disco jealous you areas green absinthe creeps out of my teeth and nailswhen you try to hurt me with weave-wearing women.

Blistered bruises…

…on my feet and calves after sweat dancing ‘til last call.I can’t go on strutting into broken glass liquor rooms,dancing on the egos of spit in your hair photo girlsas the Carib maraca DJ and I become one wax groovewhen everyone else is wishing for the radio mix.

Lit formaldehyde…

…in my mouth, when forgotten family history is buried under party loft slats.I can’t go on crawling in hazy stupid stupor on futons and old cereal,floating between kill the dendrites and pronunciato memoria,as Julia de Burgos and Nicolas Guillen simultaneously dare mewhen I thought I’d taken every dare and come out the brave one.

Dust crusted DNA…

…in my veins and saliva as outbursts burn inside once motionless eardrums.I can’t go on silencing greatgrandmotherfathers with vinegar bandages,squeezing down faces tree branches with dead air culture,as I hear what could be a stifled whimper that says, “danceshinespeak.”When my voice and body and ancestry merge, the color is ecstasy.

p o e T r y

She rests on a beach she is not allowed on. Her clothes are from a store she cannot afford. In her dreams she wakes up to a house that is larger on the inside than it is on the outside. The flies have turned into water lilies that flap like fans to cool the midday death sun. The family dog takes her on a tour of the church spires that Gaudi-twirl into the depths of the inner labyrinth. Books line the walls of the room at the end of the spiral darkness that illuminates the words she never sees. Brown stained carvings reach to her and guide her into the main hall escalator where students ignore her arrival. She gets lost looking for her locker which has a combination she cannot remember.

Her platform shoes were not given to her so she walks barefoot in golden sandals. Red candles mimic the blood on her hands which belongs to the mother she did not murder. The bicycle she wished for is not hanging on the back stairs that she repeatedly walks down while holding a knife. She is in the room she cannot find again and the students appear and reappear. If she crawls out of the knick knack nook she will be in her house again which she is already inside of. Her mother buys cheap ornaments that are expensive. The house is transparent to sunlight when she crawls into the darkness of the church spires and book room and the modern school. The larger rooms are within the walls which

are skinnier than she is because not even the walls have eaten. She smiles her sadness with closed lips to hide the cosmetic dentistry that hasn’t been done. Her cousin doesn’t send letters that she reads closely to connect with the outside world. Water fills the school and she underwater paddles through the columns and arches and banisters. When she wakes up she is in the ocean that is not hers and swims with dreams that salt the world inside her walls.

Grisel Y. AcostaDream Water Breath Death

4 | mipo march 2008

GrISel y. acoSTa was born and raised in Chicago by her Cuban mother and Colombian father. Her parents met during their studies at the Seminario de Matanzas and fell in love while sitting under flamboyan trees on top of a hill that overlooked the city. They married, moved to Colombia, then New York, then Chicago. Grisel, as an adult, moved to New York where she met her husband, Vincent, at a poetry reading.

Grisel has a B.A. in journalism, a M.Ed. in English and is now pursuing her Ph.D. in English as a Hispanic Leadership Scholar in San Antonio. She writes news and feature articles, songs, short stories and plays, in addition to poetry, and she often performs her work. Grisel has been a featured poet at the Nuyorican Poet’s Café, the Bowery Poetry Club, La MaMa, the University of Massachusetts–Amherst, the Geraldine Dodge East Bruswick Poetry Festival, the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center, and many other venues across the United States.

Her work has been published in Chicago’s After Hours Literary Magazine, the NAACP Image Award-nominated Check the Rhyme: An Anthology of Female Poets and MCs, and the upcoming Latino/a issue of Pembroke Literary Magazine, among others. Influences seen in her work include urban v. rural living, Chicago house and punk music, multiculturalism, multilingualism, sci-fi, mathematics, cyberspace, female identity and class issues. Her monthly blog is writetoright.blogspot.com.

p o e T r y

Instinct, only,to see and hear whatever is coming and going,losing the self to cold brick and telephone poles,live wire sparking at the puddle, undulatingasphault fired beneath rubber and sun:

Sam tells you it's not youso much as what you can write downbetween Con Edison and the scattering cucaracha,who was here before you,who will be here after the last bomb drops.

Under the 174th Street Bridge,the Bronx River feeds green to shattered concrete and poisoned soil.What were once weeds, now trees, bursting through unfriendly ground to snake around the bridge's rusted neck.

Green glass bottles grow in the branches(each one pregnant with new rain),and the gods of project housingbuild bigger brick cathedrals,where their landlords seal winter inside.

"Muerte bottles," Sam reflects. "In memoryof the dead." I count them each.

God is the memory of a small glass bottle, the music of a tree turned windchime in August. I hear lifewhere death should be, sunlight smiling through glass and leaves. Surrendered self among unwelcoming forms: stranger, leave your burdens, leave the road.

Rich Villar174th Street after A. R. Ammons

march 2008 mipo | 7

Instinct, only,to see and hear whatever is coming and going,losing the self to cold brick and telephone poles,live wire sparking at the puddle, undulatingasphault fired beneath rubber and sun:

Sam tells you it's not youso much as what you can write downbetween Con Edison and the scattering cucaracha,who was here before you,who will be here after the last bomb drops.

Under the 174th Street Bridge,the Bronx River feeds green to shattered concrete and poisoned soil.What were once weeds, now trees, bursting through unfriendly ground to snake around the bridge's rusted neck.

Green glass bottles grow in the branches(each one pregnant with new rain),and the gods of project housingbuild bigger brick cathedrals,where their landlords seal winter inside.

"Muerte bottles," Sam reflects. "In memoryof the dead." I count them each.

God is the memory of a small glass bottle, the music of a tree turned windchime in August. I hear lifewhere death should be, sunlight smiling through glass and leaves. Surrendered self among unwelcoming forms: stranger, leave your burdens, leave the road.

6 | mipo march 2008

p o e T r y : G r I S e l y . a c o S T a

I.My cousins ask for Vuarnetsunglasses and Girbaud jeans.My parents cannot afford such gifts.Huge photo portraits of Dorquitas and Angiegrace the high-ceilinged sitting room.I am jealous.When I ask the fuzzy-haired maid for candy,she expects some money.“Noooo!” is all I can answer;my embarrassment has no words.No one has explained that even candy costs money.

II.Logan Square is a tough mixof Cuban, Puerto Rican, Polish and Chinesefood, music, lacquered cars and glitter nail polish.By sixth grade, we’ve learned blue eyelinerlooks best when it’s running.I hide my fear.When the third-run movie theater boyasks to rap to methe answer is yes.One older girl watches us with interest;the big brother usher tsks and says, “You’re too young.”

III.A white man decides my mathskills are better than what others thought.Honors algebra will be the new home Icannot speak of to my neighborhoodfriends. They wouldn’t get it.I like variables.A year later, geometry theorems confine me.Neon yellow grids with infinite numberscapture me, direct me, trap me.They take shape among stars in space,but my theory is different.

Concentric Circles

CRITICISM (n.) a. the act of criticizing usually unfavorably,b. the art of evaluating or analyzing works of literature,c. the scientific investigation of literary documents in regard to such matters as origin, t text, composition, or history.

SCIENCE (n.) The state of knowing.

ART (n.) The applied expression of knowledge.

POET. (n.) from the Greek, poiesis, a making or creating.One who makescreatescombinesOne who combines (synthesizes) One who synthesizes words in sequence to create meaning for readers.See also: Scientist.

POET. (v.) to engage in the business of writing poetry.e.g. “We were out poeting again, though she hates hummus.”

FICTION (n.) a story that is not true, told to convey a central thesis.

NON FICTION (n.) a story that is true, told to convey a central thesis.

POEM (n.) a series of words sometimes arranged into metered lines that may or may not be a story, may or may not be true, may or may not convey a central thesis, may or may not challenge the reader to pull statues from pedestals.

POETRY (n.) the engaged business of the poet.e.g. “I’m going to the poetry again. No, they are not paying me.”

Definitions

march 2008 mipo | 9

p o e T r y : r I c h v I l l a r

O baby babybaby of my soul-lover temptation bosomkiss Roosevelt Corollary,you break my heart so perfectlywith your mouth like a coup d'etat.

Take me to your catacombs, Comandante,let me breathe in your disappeared,your shapeshift moneydriftpolicy statements,presidents and privileges, executive and otherwise.

Let your angel breath, sweeter than all Allendes,carte blanche my assassinations. Helicopter gunship lover,Pinochet me until I howl in your barracks,hard and fast like a Fort Benning buglewaking all neighbors foreign and domestic.

Interrogate me with your Sandinista thighs,and I will swim naked in your napalm lakes,your treaty violations, your Vietnam heroin caskets.You U.N. charter, let me taste your disdainfor international law,you precedent, you loophole,you unelected unelector.Serve at the pleasure of my President,now and forever, amen.

I love you like Venezuela loves left-wing politics.I love you like an Ayatollah and failed embargoes.I love you like Saddam's statue smashingfourfivesixseven thousand U.S. troops.I love you like death camps, death squads,death marches, and death.I love you like an Al Qaeda boxcutter,tower one, tower two.

Teach me how to love your Patriot Acts,your missile defense systemsand slowed disaster responses.

Teach me, Henry,how to love your world.

Ode to Henry Kissinger

8 | mipo march 2008

rIch vIllar is a child of 1980’s North Jersey excess: big hair, freestyle club music, urban/suburban sprawl, bodegas, and loud house parties. He survived a childhood spent learning Bob Jones-approved Fundamentalist dogma at two private Christian schools, as well as the long slog of state-funded undergraduate education, and various stints flirting with careers in law, politics, and retail electronics sales.

p o e T r y

Elisa Albo

There's no hot milk skin test of doneness no meat thermometer popping up kitchen timer jolting

your complacency no toothpick slipping out cleanly dry no cake edges separating from a hot pan gelatin setting souffle rising

water absorbing your kitchen won't smell like fried fish for days there'll be no smoking skillet sticky counters

muddy floors when you're done when it's time someone will yank open the oven door unbolt the front and back doors

for a cross breeze yeah, you're whipping up a storm and you'll finally deeply take an untrammeled breath

and get out steam escaping a kettle dissipating fading like a far off train whistle into a moon-burned night.

Getting Out of the Kitchen and on with Your Life

march 2008 mipo | 11

The mournful sounds of “Hatikva” waft in from the patio, my daughter lifting each syllable of the Israeli anthem she learned in preschool as if from a heart she can’t know is hers, each tender tone a dull stab in my chest—“Hatikva” was my grandmother’s favorite song. Mima rarely listened to music or stepped into a synogogue, but if “Hatikva” came into her hearing, she would clutch her heart and sigh as if for all of her losses. As a young woman in Turkey when my grandfather first appeared at her house, she didn’t like him until a younger sister noted his beautiful blue eyes. Gursusica, Mima thought, I’d better grab him before she does. They married, moved to Spain, had ten children, never saw their parents again. In ‘43, my grandfather died of pneumonia, their oldest child 14, their youngest, my mother, one. Franco, fear, bombs, hunger. After the war, they migrated to Cuba—Castro, fear, guns, less hunger—then the U.S. There is a picture of Mima, my mother, my sister, my niece—four generations in the house I grew up in. Mima died in ’85. My daughter was born nearly twenty years later. She sings “Hatikva”deliberately—Ko o lo va ley va, pa ni iI ma, nefesh yehudi ho o mia...—and Mima shuffles by in her slippers, again crossing the family room, admonishing me for walking barefoot on the cold tile floor. I kiss her cheek and follow her into the kitchen, watch her smooth and able hands make borekas and biscochos, the doughy pastries and sweet biscuits of my youth. My baby cries.She’s hungry, Mima says, and for a moment, we are in the same room, listening.

Hatikva


elISa albo was born in Havana and grew up in Lakeland, Florida. All of her grandparents were Sephardic Jews from Turkey who emigrated to Spain or Cuba and then to the United States.

Elisa’s poetry has appeared in Alimentum, Crab Orchard Review, The MacGuffin, Poetry East, Tigertail: A South Florida Annual, and Irrepressible Appetites. Her chapbook, Passage to America, was published by March Street Press in 2006.

p o e T r y : e l I S a a l b o

Each wave rises like an arched eyebrowon the shore. Its crash creates a mightyfoam I could wash in if I hurried.A brush dipped in fire, the sun paintsthe Pacific white-hot, Pollack dripping enamel. Her surface sizzles like chiles in grease and swings a lacy skirt along the sand—a campesina from Colima dancing el baile del iguana. Afternoon smells like a skull-split coconut, like Kent Ellsworth’s car when we parked on Beerman’s Point in ‘76, sixteen-year-olds saturatingthe bicentennial the small-town waywe knew how—no one arched an eyebrow then.In Mexico for a rest, I’m far awayfrom those fumblings—hijole, ‘mano, one can miss those moments when anxiety was fraught with comedy, when failure in the form of razor-sharp zippers and burst buttons split us with laughter and sent us for beer. “Baby, I love your way, every day…”was our Neitzche. We were as carelessas cargo ships. We dove into the sealike torpedo pelicans and years latercame up with our catch. Mimi drove herlittle brother to a speech therapistand, as soon as he could, made him learnher real name. In time, she left townin a hot little Celica, a red standardshe couldn’t test-drive, not ‘til she learnedto shift gears. Here in Manzanillo, palm fronds shake their curves like shy coquettes. “Yo soy una mujer sincera, de donde crece la palma….” As I walk the beach,a catty seamstress pricks my feet with her teeth. I met the man of my dreams and one week later, left him for a month. Each day is the last of its kind we’ll be apart. The waves crush the shore in ferocious approval.

Baby, I Love Your Way

12 | mipo march 2008

Each wave rises like an arched eyebrowon the shore. Its crash creates a mightyfoam I could wash in if I hurried.A brush dipped in fire, the sun paintsthe Pacific white-hot, Pollack dripping enamel. Her surface sizzles like chiles in grease and swings a lacy skirt along the sand—a campesina from Colima dancing el baile del iguana. Afternoon smells like a skull-split coconut, like Kent Ellsworth’s car when we parked on Beerman’s Point in ‘76, sixteen-year-olds saturatingthe bicentennial the small-town waywe knew how—no one arched an eyebrow then.In Mexico for a rest, I’m far awayfrom those fumblings—hijole, ‘mano, one can miss those moments when anxiety was fraught with comedy, when failure in the form of razor-sharp zippers and burst buttons split us with laughter and sent us for beer. “Baby, I love your way, every day…”was our Neitzche. We were as carelessas cargo ships. We dove into the sealike torpedo pelicans and years latercame up with our catch. Mimi drove herlittle brother to a speech therapistand, as soon as he could, made him learnher real name. In time, she left townin a hot little Celica, a red standardshe couldn’t test-drive, not ‘til she learnedto shift gears. Here in Manzanillo, palm fronds shake their curves like shy coquettes. “Yo soy una mujer sincera, de donde crece la palma….” As I walk the beach,a catty seamstress pricks my feet with her teeth. I met the man of my dreams and one week later, left him for a month. Each day is the last of its kind we’ll be apart. The waves crush the shore in ferocious approval.

We buy a house. Not one of those Spanish-tiled numbers that have drowned this town with their stealthy shine; our home has hardwood dignity, pewter fixtures, fruit trees out back. We hire a cleaning lady. Her name is Pilar. She dusts the grain and amber furniture, cooks our dinner at night - gallo pinto, plantains, all forms of slaughtered meat. Pilar smokes on the back patio. She makes me want to smoke too, only I can’t because I’m trying to get pregnant and read that I should purge myself of all I love before conceiving.

At night I listen for your snore, wait for your octopus stretch across the bed. I slip across thepatio, past key lime, mango, sapodilla and mamey. White-soled and ravenous, I climb branches,swallow skins, save the seeds for later, knowing even the shriveled ones can bear life.

Hotels, sure, but also pastel monoliths to fortune and revival,to traveler’s palms, to citronella, to mambo and techno;Praise bay leaves, star jasmine, alleys seeded with saffron and ordered refuse,praise the diamond-clad ships cruising the horizon,fluid and pre-ordained, and the skychalked cobalt and plum, everythingrose-soaked until the very air is watercolored solace.

So what if we’re rum-drunk, if we dined on too muchchocolate and salt and the good meat of grouper?These are the godly nights, belonging exactlyto what is loved: a friend’s voice, the familiarhands at the elbow, and the wind plyingthe skin, grateful for summer.

What Would Have Happened If I Had Married You

In an Alcove Between the Beacon and the Avalon

The problem with buying concert tickets in advance: you never know what axis you’ll be resting on when the not-so-grand event arrives, say, Jane’s Addiction, sewn up and slap-lacquered, just in time to join the mustyclans of reunion tours, looping the country like shriveled troubadours, in search of hands to make them whole.At least the nights have lost their heated metal edge, and the moon is ringed in amethyst and slate, and the band has somehow crept through the city of bodies to a small off-stage altar.Kites spin above heads. Dust rises into light.

Autumn, Unexpected

mipo | 15

p o e T r y

The beginning should eat the eyes.It’s the part of the movie where you step into lineat the bodega with our Lady of the Sponge Curlers.She’s buying toilet paper and Mahatma rice. This is her life and you happened to ease into it at the wooden lull between explosions.

You could also begin while she’s watching her husband drop the scotch he’s sucked for days,hear the glass break magnificent rain over the linoleum.

If you are still mouthlessuse seraphim and penumbra.Both will drape the frame in velvet, pearl the hems with high art and smart girl words that hide god please god don’t let me flinch fail fall into the dark.A mention of Babel or blackberrieswouldn’t hurt either.

The question of where to snap the line at its finest edgecan freeze the brain with dread.The blade must be sharp enough to halve the moon and the dark clutter of sky. Ignore this for the moment.

There is nothing leftexcept the flutter of wings beneath the stabbing,the woman before the stove, stirring rice and wishing death,the river outside her window, how it glosses after rain,not like mirrors or a polished lens, simplywater, falling, dark.

Emma TrellesHow To Write A Poem: Theory #62


eMMa TrelleS was born in Miami and has never lived more than 30 minutes from the Atlantic Ocean. Emma’s first language was Spanish but she learned to speak americano by watching Sesame Street. Today she makes her living as an art critic and staff writer at the Sun-Sentinel.

Emma is a Pushcart Prize nominee for poetry, and her poems and essays have appeared in New Millennium Writings, OCHO, Gulf Stream, Newsday, the Miami Herald, and Latina. She is a series editor of the Tigertail anthologies and has taught creative writing at the Florida Center for the Literary Arts, the ArtCenter/South Florida and Florida International University.

Her first book of poems is forthcoming this fall from MiPO Press.

r e v I e w

Oscar Hijuelos, Rhythm King

a review by Kirk CurnuttIn 1994, Martha Bayles published a critique of rock ‘n’ roll entitled Hole in Our Soul: The Loss of Beauty and Meaning in American Popular Music. Her thesis was that mainstream popular music had grown increasingly anti-musical because rock had abandoned rhythm under the mistaken (and racist) assumption that its black traditions embodied shock and primitivism instead of syncopation and swing. Hole in Our Soul was neither the first nor the last time this argument has been made, and it is always guaranteed to rile the rock establishment into defending the supposedly liberating values of all things loud, hard, and fast. Last fall, when New Yorker pop music critic Sasha Frere-Jones chided the notoriously insular indie rock scene for failing to attempt any “musical miscegenation” out of political correctness, he ignited a comparable firestorm that must have given Bayles a twitch of empathy. She, too, was harshly attacked for daring to point out that rock long ago lost its roll.

In my crankier moods, I sometimes fantasize about writing an essay that, like Bayles and Frere-Jones, would ask where the groove has gone—only in prose, not music. Nearly twenty years after it became di

rigeur to lament the stunted, Raymond Carver-style of minimalism that dominated American writing in the 1970s and 80s, we still live in the age of the declarative sentence. Fiction written in this mode is the literary equivalent of IKEA furniture—sleek, urban, hip, but irredeemably cold. The reasons for its plodding simplicity are many: the desire to convey emotional detachment and ennui, the presumption that readers can no longer abide intricate styles, the fear of appearing too literary. Many writers these days, like their rock counterparts, seem wholly flatfooted when it comes to rhythm.

Whenever the lack of musicality gets too much for me to bear, I reach for Oscar Hijuelos. Given that he is best-known for a novel about Cuban brothers mamboing to fame in the 1950s, it is not surprising that his style would prove so complimentary to his subject matter, which usually involves some musical angle. Hijuelos is a devout jazz fan and amateur musician who is on record as stating “I absolutely despise modern rock and roll.” As a result, his prose eschews the sort of stolid, stultifying rigor that a 4/4 beat often devolves into. If it were possible to transcribe his sentences to treble and clef, the


My mind spins with an afternoon wind blurring my life into the gray of the highway and the shade of your lids, an ocean of alcohol splashing inside you, pulling you towards an edge I want to keep you away from.

We drive with the windows down, the falling afternoon refracting the April sun wrapping around my head like a halo of brightness. You blast the radio as loud as my father used to, the shadow of the past looming, La Fabulosa, his nostalgic Cuban songs, Celia Cruz, “Pinar del Rio que lindo eres de Guanajay hasta Guanes,” yet another version of “El Dia Que Me Quieras,” salsa favorites, “Los zapatos de Manacho son de carton, son de carton,” complete with lane weaving and that tap, tap, tapping on the horn helping him keep time on the steering wheel of the white Impala with the electric windows that I feared would cause our eventual death when we fell into the canal along West 4th, drowning us all since he was the only one who knew how to swim.

There is a whole repertoire in this guidebook of self-destruction mapping our lives with amber-colored helplessness in the land of shame and lament, damn inheritance nobody wants, but he is speeding, weaving, reaching beyond the blur of cars, shadowboxing in Miami traffic, alcohol singing with him, “Yo no estaba en el arroyo cuando sé murió Don Goyo. Qué pregunten, qué pregunten. Qué averiguen el embrollo,” and I know this is no way to travel, but I am no escapist.

Though I cannot see myself,I know that I am there, standingon the gray, greased-stained drivewayat Tía Alina’s, en Marianao, La Lisa, en la Habana, Cuba.

Sunlight outlines my hair, a halo, and the wind, the perfect partner,whirls my flower-print dress,touches my knees,spins me into a waltzof tropical colors,and I tilt back into a distancethat echoes like the skin of summer.

Sandra CastilloQuickening Days

This is What Happens When I Fall Asleep

p o e T r y

SaNdra caSTIllo was born in Havana and left the island in Summer 1970 on one of President Johnson’s freedom flights. Her poems have appeared in On Growing Up Latino in the US (Henry Holt & Co, 1994), Fifty-Five Latino Poets (Persea, 1995), Little Havana Blues (Arte Publico Press, 1996), The Poetry of Displacement (University of Iowa Press, 2001), Burnt Sugar, Caña Quemada, Contemporary Cuban Poetry (Free Press, 2006), and more.

Castillo is an amateur genealogist and South Florida resident. Her collection, My Father Sings to My Embarrassment, was published by White Pine Press. She has work forthcoming in Nimrod International Journal of Poetry & Prose, 13 Moons, Coal City Review, The Comstock Review, Gargoyle Magazine, and Lake Effect.

I won’t bore you with the names of all the technical effects in play here. The point is that the rhythm-tapping exercise won’t work. Hijuelos so varies his sentences structures—burying the verb behind subordinate clauses here, lobbing them upfront there, doubling and tripling them elsewhere with all those ands—that our natural inclination to ground the beat in the pulse of the standard subject/predicate format simply doesn’t work. It’s a paragraph designed to sweep our eyes off their feet.

As popular and historically important as Mambo Kings remains, it is not—in my humble opinion—Hijuelos’s greatest hit. I’ve always thought Nestor dies way too early in the plot, leaving Cesar to ride out shifts in 1960s’ and ’70s’ musical tastes that are too often described in a remote summary style that mutes the pathos of the surviving brother’s fall into obscurity. My own favorite, instead, is A Simple Habana Melody, which strikes me both as more dramatically precise and, interestingly enough, more musically complex. The story of composer Israel Levis’s journey from 1930s’ Cuba to expatriate Paris to the hell of Nazi Buchenwald and back, it explores the conflicts between politics and art to ask a seemingly insoluble question: at what point, if any, does the consolation of music become an escape from the horrors of inhumanity? The question is explored through the contrast between two pivotal moments. First, the narrative circles repeatedly back to the writing of Israel’s most famous rumba, “Rosas Puras,” inspired by the beautiful Rita Valladares, whose interpretation of the song is as close as she and Israel come to consummating their mutual desire. Then, more elliptically, are the references to Israel performing the song for the obergruppenfurhrer of Buchenwald, something he must do to survive but which taints his belief in the sublimity of music: “What tormented him was the violation of his belief that goodness would prevail over evil in the world, that the sovereignty of beauty should have magically protected him from the likes of Reinhard Heydrich, expediter of the ‘final solution’ in France.”

The Nazi appropriation of art is not a new theme in literature, but its juxtaposition to Hijuelos’s richly informed portrait of Cuban musicality makes it feel as if it were. As with Mambo Kings, the novel seeks to educate the reader on Cuban forms—particularly the zarzuela, a type of Spanish opera—but the book’s triumph would be muted if not for the virtuoso styling. Here, for example, is Hijuelos describing Israel’s everyday inspiration on the streets of Habana:

The tick tack rapping of the shoemaker’s hammer, brooms sweeping dust out of darkened entranceways, the cries of children playing in the gutter, the singsong chants of vendors selling newspapers, coffee, lottery tickets and roasted peanuts—“¡Mani!”—others ringing bells and selling shots of aguardiente and bottles of medicinal items with names like ‘Neptune’s Cure’ to protect against malaria, for half of the city slept under mosquito netting at night. He heard music in the sonorous tinkle of water-splashed fountains, in the clip clop of horse hooves, in the clanging of church bells, in the straining voices of divines preaching in the placitos on Sunday mornings. And in churches, like Jesús María, or Nuestra Señora del Pilar, or Espíritu Santo, which he frequently visited, for the stony saints and images of the suffering Jesus inspired him, the latter two being the churches, where, in fact, he had gotten his musical start as a child prodigy of nine playing the organ (and receiving the grace of God) during services…

Most simply, he would thank God for bringing him into the world in which such a magicality like music existed.

I’ll take a paragraph like this any day over the martial chop of rock-bred writers. Given how abbreviated e-mail speak seems to reshaping reader tastes into short blasts of epigrammatic chatter, I’ll go so far as to thank God that we still have writers like Hijuelos to keep the magicality of music on the printed page.

r e v I e w b y k I r k c u r N u T T

resulting chart would reveal how he lavishes in unusual and shifting time signatures, alternating cadences and accents, and dense, polyphonic chord structures. Hijuelos may title a book A Simple Habana Melody (2002), but the description is deceiving only to those who don’t know that in jazz the melody is often the simplest element of the composition. It has to be; otherwise, what rumbas below can’t bubble up.

For readers whose knowledge of popular music only goes back as far as Elvis Presley, Hijuelos’s work is a veritable primer on 20th-century Cuban styles, both their history and variety. Suffice it to say that before The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love (1989)—the first novel by a Hispanic writer to win the Pulitzer Prize—mainstream America’s understanding of Latin beats was limited to film and television flashes of Xavier Cugat, Tito Puente, and, of course, Desi Arnaz. However brilliant, these musicians tended to provide a sensuous, congo-paddling backdrop for whatever romantic or comedic intrigues were happening in the foreground; even on I Love Lucy, scenes in which Arnaz’s Ricky Ricardo led his orchestra through a rousing number were rarely more than setups for Lucille Ball’s slapstick. The brilliance of the famous scene in Mambo Kings in which Cesar and Nestor Castillo appear on I Love Lucy as Manny and Alfredo Reyes, singing their bolero “Beautiful María of My Soul,” rests in the contrast between the musicians’ authentic feeling of transcendence as they perform with Arnaz and Ball’s shticky professionalism in delivering her trademark plea: “But, Ricky, you promised me the chance to sing on the show!” And while the brothers’ fictional appearance on television launches their career, one of the novel’s underlying themes is how their musical dexterity at not only boleros and mambas but cha-cha-chas and congas is lost upon audiences unschooled in the distinctions and between these musical modes. To the crowds that come to revel in the heat of the Mambo Kings’ brief fame before Nestor’s premature death, Latin music is all one big generic hip-shaking opportunity to shout Olé!

It would be wrong to say that Hijeulos’s sentences are attempts to emulate specific types of Cuban music. I doubt such a thing is really possible. Rather, his fondness for heavily subordinated, almost labyrinth-like syntax allows him to create beats that swing through their irregular pacing. By avoiding the staccato, metronomic feel that overly consistent stress patterns and metrical feet creates in, say, iambic pentameter, he generates rhythms that effectively play around the reader’s sense of where the downbeat should fall—an old drummer’s trick that lends what can only be called sway to the flow of a cadence. A good experiment to understand the resulting effect is to try to tap a consistent beat on one’s wrist while reading the following passage, which describes an early Mambo Kings performance:

And then, when the song had turned around again and Cesar sang the last verse, [Delores] stood under the stage where the trumpet play was standing, and smiled at him. He had been lost in a stony-faced concentration, but he was happy to see her. Then they went into a fast number, a mambo. Sly smile on his face, Cesar Castillo gave a nod to the percussionist, whose hands were taped up like a boxer’s, and he started to bop, bop, bop on a quinto drum, and in came the piano with its Latin vamp, then the alternating bass. Another nod from Cesar and the others came in, and Cesar started dancing before the big ball microphone, his white leather, golden-buckled shoes darting in and out like agitated compass needles. And Nestor, standing in with the bass, blew his trumpet so hard in his exhilaration over seeing Delores, whose presence seemed to soothe his inner pain, his face turned red and his pensive head seemed ready to burst. And the crowds on the dance floor wriggled and bounced, and the musicians enjoyed Nestor’s solo and were shaking their heads, and he played happily, just hoping to impress Delores.

Is it her apparition in water?

This distance between two points

that clutches memory?

The way a speck of land, a peak

rising in the horizon, looms like a titan.

Palm fronds sifted by winds.

Clouds bunched up over roofs,

a sleet rain falling

over banyans,

jacarandas,

framboyans . . .

Is it the perfect orb of mangos?

Soursop and papaya aroma?

When a flock of feral parrots

screech by, the feeling of eternal

exile roots itself in water.

Is it the poet’s song, Lorca’s moment

of despair, the sound of one bata

drum, the che-che

of chekeres? Women dressed

in white with red scarves in their

hair?

Everyone returns to water here,

lured by its secret charm,

listen to a siren’s song.

Whoever beckons this blueness

forth cannot help but drown in it.

If it were the Eucharist, it’d be hard to swallow,

this moon of lost impressions, a boy in deep water,

something tickling his skin. He remembers warm

liquid he floated in before, this memory of buoyancy–

It is a round kite that somehow still manages to hang

in the dog mouth blackness of the sky. A medusa

jellyfish, a paper cutout of the moon. Blemishes and all.

Or is this a savior’s moon? Tranquil though expectant,

this boy will float on home, or be swallowed

by eternity’s water, serve some higher purpose.

Through the pines and mangroves, this moon hovers.

It is the one eye of God that remains open

Blue Cuban

Moon


vIrGIl Suarez was born in Havana, Cuba in 1962 and emigrated to the US with his parents in 1974. Suarez attended public schools in Los Angeles and graduated from CSULB in 1984, then attended LSU’s MFA program. He moved to Miami where he met his wife, with whom he shares two wonderful daughters. Suarez has taught at several schools, including University of Texas at Austin and Bennington College, and has been a professor of creative writing and literature at The Florida State University.

She’s learned to stay down for good,

because water fills her ears with voices,

muffled and yet so clear. They speak

to her of this riddle of waves. Plummet.

Directions to show her the way.

If not her, her son on a raft above her.

She looks up through water to see him.

She has become one with the hungry

depth. Her eyes turn opaline, her hands

clutch the shadows, claws at them,

become anemones in the chiaroscuro

of this half-lit dream. Her effort to push

him along render her breathless.

In her lungs, the water is mercury heavy–

it too helps keep her suspended below

the surface, anchored against strong currents.

Her fever-ridden son dreams of her

in the star-filled night. Underneath

him she continues to pull along, drag

him toward shore, freedom, exile.

Her body a ghostly vessel nobody finds.

What lures you to the lip of water,

dark in the night? Starglow, moon

riddles of light, gauzy, evanescence,

this charm of endless waves,

warm water, currents that take you

always toward tomorrow? What?

Inner tubes, rope, plastic milk jugs,

the kind tourists bring and discard.

In them one a hundred cucuyos, fireflies,

their green luminescence a needed

light that illuminates the way

in such intensely ink-dark night.

Listen carefully to the flow of water,

for it speaks of the way to freedom.

Two bodies can fit on a slab

of Styrofoam, keeping each warm

in the southerly breeze, teeth chatter

or is it the sound of all the dead balseros

who braved the currents but didn’t beat

the odds? A worm moon blushes white?

Who is there to witness such difficult

crossings? Those who speak with water

in their mouths, opaque blue veil in eyes.

Virgil SuarezLa madre del agua Balsero / Rafter

p o e T r y


It means I’m on a journey—

Is the soil blood red, or brick red?

To witness miles of tobacco’s green waves.

Yes, I know, no yearning for the island,

or talk about a Mango tree in the backyard (Carol City).

What about burrs in the grass pricking my feet?

Graffiti? My Cuban sitter built

a tiled shrine to Mary, my only mother.

I sat at her feet for days.

What it means to be Cuban

hyphenated? I don’t know—

My father’s from Cuba. I’m American.

He wanted me to learn one language really well.

sealed grey, pose the branch and its crimson

accoutrements for their last days. The iron

register whistles heat because double hung

windows fail to stall cold air. Leaf’s paper

texture? A poor communion wafer. Saint Lucia,

lend your crown of candles ? let

its wax drip onto hair, let the sparks catch.

What It Means to be Cuban, Hyphenated

Clerestory Sky


It means I’m on a journey—

Is the soil blood red, or brick red?

To witness miles of tobacco’s green waves.

Yes, I know, no yearning for the island,

or talk about a Mango tree in the backyard (Carol City).

What about burrs in the grass pricking my feet?

Graffiti? My Cuban sitter built

a tiled shrine to Mary, my only mother.

I sat at her feet for days.

What it means to be Cuban

hyphenated? I don’t know—

My father’s from Cuba. I’m American.

He wanted me to learn one language really well.

sealed grey, pose the branch and its crimson

accoutrements for their last days. The iron

register whistles heat because double hung

windows fail to stall cold air. Leaf’s paper

texture? A poor communion wafer. Saint Lucia,

lend your crown of candles let

its wax drip onto hair, let the sparks catch.

Suzanne FrischkornI discovered Cuba chiseled in Retiro Parque. Glimpsed Cuba second-hand, and Canadian. Cuba in picture books, its myths tangled paper cigar rings, cigar box treasure.

Cuba, I will come to liberate you, I promised and toasted “Cuba Libre!” with some Costa Rican ladies, they laughed and laughed and laughed, “That was funny,” they said.

On the terrazzo drank café con leche, took dawn with Spanish sky. (I have yet to meet a flamingo I didn’t like and still the stork evades me.) In Cuba, right now, someone conducts

a symphony of furtive braiding for a tourist. She’ll leave before the last braid is half-done.

And did you think you would live forever? Perhaps as long as an oak tree, a burl on its trunk. And did

you think death would get easier? Like the tree sprouting from a skull, leaves tangled and battered

was my hair. And did you know it would happen? I did, the sun outshines the moon, the seed

germinates with water and soil. And did you want? Yes. And now what will you do?

Sing, for the song.

Letra

Samhain

p o e T r y


SuzaNNe frISchkorN was born in Hialeah, Florida to a Cuban father and American mother of Spanish descent. At age five, her family moved to the Northeast.

She is the author of five chapbooks, most recently Spring Tide, selected for the Aldrich Poetry Award. American Flamingo is forthcoming from MiPOesias in early 2008. Lit Windowpane, her first full-length book, will be released by Main Street Rag Press in autumn 2008.

Her poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Ecotone, Indiana Review, No Tell Motel, the anthology Conversation Pieces: Poems That Talk to Other Poems (Knopf, 2007) and elsewhere. Frischkorn has served as an editor for Samsära Quarterly and is recipient of a 2007 Artist Fellowship from the Connecticut Commission on Culture & Tourism.

p o e T r y

Hugo Rodriguezmornings, I mop the firehouse floor.The overhead doors are up, the trucks:a Pierce, an International, and a street–torn Fordshimmy on the station’s wet apronas sunlight inches up the glossy terrazzo.It’s a glorious start to each tour.No sirens, no strobe lights, no bloodstains,no-one screaming Run motherfuckerhe’s dying here! My mop head simply glidesfrom side to side. Sure, the gloss will dry.The spider-cracks and oil stains will reappear.But my mop spit-shines a showroom floorand warms my shoulders, each patchedwith Miami and a blue Coconut Palm.

The first medics must have seen themselvesas saviors of the sick and street-torn, heroeswho stood roll call each morning, angelswith wings on their starched uniform collars,silver wings to chariot across city bridgesarmed with oxygen and thunder to shockailing hearts because everything was not okay.

How handsome they must have appeared,these men, rising from clouds of cavalry dustto battle death in the trenches of each tragedy.Their saves were more beautiful than birth.They could part the purple sky with an amp of adrenaline. They carried life packs, each held the heartbeat of a thousand little birds.

Not a word. Not a struggle to survive.Not a gasp or a groan on a night the moon is a ruptured spleen.Not the hoarse voice of a preacherwho buries another victim. Not a few crumbs of small-talkabout the terminal disease,not a word on the complications nor a tone to summon the crash cart to the CCU. Not a concern. Not a care about the dog or the rude neighborsor his wife sobbing in the kitchen.Not a prayer. Not a bit of bickering.Not a polite hello or a simple question:Who is it or Can you please save me?

C-Shift

The Gods of Rescue

D.O.A


huGo rodrIGuez resides in Hialeah, Florida with his wife, whom he met on a volcanic beach in Costa Rica, and four children. In his spare time, Hugo coaches little league basketball and tries to develop a healthy sense of competition and teamwork in each child.

Hugo has been a firefighter for the City of Miami since 1982, his current assignment being Chief of Emergency Medical Services. An MFA graduate of FIU, his poems have appeared in TriQuarterly, The Bitter Oleander, and Gulfstream.

Blue skies and endless tediumin this paradise for workersand tourists, especially.Everybody’s got something to do.

It’s all within or withoutThe Revolution.Everybody understands this.Everybody understands this.

A peasant is sitting on a lamp post,black as a nut, white as a ghost.He holds his chin,hangs on.

Me, I’m way over my head,over-the-top with nostalgiathey'll say, though it's not true --I never had any of this to miss.

Here's what I care about:The million waving at the plaza,the gesture an acquired traitencoded, now innate.

May first.Watching on the TV.The phone rings.Oh yeah, just got back, it’s so hot.

We’re experts in lies,in reading between the lines,in moving the mental furnitureuntil it’s comfy here again.

The plaza empties.We wave at the TVjust in case.Within, without.

we move about here, on the first floor, where we can see the two rocking chairs (their arms arthritic but proud), a black metal stool with a clover green cushion and a limp, the overflowing work table, the ambassador’s gift (a portrait in pastels he painted himself, not of anyone he represents but of those he’s come to love on his assignment), framed family photos (none including the husband/father, who’s been replaced by images of a long ago and much remembered lover), dishes in buckets on the floor (within reach), a standing wall, books (many books), three bottles of whiskey (green, black and blue labels), a trophy (one, but representing many), aspirin, a smoked ham.

upstairs, there’s a bed, rain leaking from the roof and gathering on the long-dead light fixture, a fan on the night table, the ceiling gummy with residue from all the years of cigarettes, and a mattress, ebbing, its corners struggling with the yellow sheets.

in here somewhere, there’s an unseen constellation, a dazzle of stars.

Achy ObejasMay First 3 Stories

p o e T r y


achy obejaS was born in Havana, in el Vedado, and lived there and in Sagua la Grande the first 6 years of her life. Her family and 6-year-old Achy fled by boat to the US and lived in Miami for one year. When she was about to start second grade, her family moved to Indiana. The Midwest and its glorious falls have been her base ever since.

Dear Sister, At three, I’m leaving.

Where is Miguel? Will I know him when I see him?

Dear Sister, I’m leaving with a man who refuses to call me by name.

Bárbara, Caridad – that first night,he gave me the names of slaves to choose from.

Two slaves, two saints, his leather sandals, Miguel undressing from the bottom up.

I chose Caridad – a strip of canary yellow silk he tied in a knot at my wrist on Washington Avenue.

Déjame verte. He pushed me against a display window of sunglasses. Let me see you.

Miguel is one thousand and one. He is multiples of eight.He is so many rooms to ride through, so many arms to consider.

Siéntate.

Sister, he’s from a town called one hundred fires where everything is written in green –green sleeves, green armbands and pant legs, a green eye carved into every intersection.

A woman with a cataract sits on the northeast corner of the plaza sharing her vocation. Without a watch, clock, radio, stars or sundial she can tell you the hour. People pass by five and six times a day. Children try to trick her. Her right eye is blue and foaming like boiled milk.

Siéntate. What I thought were wise sayings turned out to be simple commands.

Siéntate. He urged: No stand up. Move into the light, so I can see you better.

Sister, a dress appears.I’m always wearing the dress and then the night and then the man –mock slapping my face.

A Miami Story

I want to thank him for picking me up at the airport and depositing my bags in a safe place in the room. I want to thank him for serving water in wineglasses. I want to alert him to the pot boiling over in the kitchen, but he assures me it is the wind -- Sssh! His voice is a puff of steam. I watch him busy himself. He’s calling friends. He’s putting away a coat that hung over the green chair. He’s taking a cassette of Issac Oveido from its case. Does he know how long I waited for this moment to be in this apartment, to be in any apartment? I touch his shoulder. Although his body is a disaster, no rib cage holds more fluttering wings. Although his arms are paling and without tone, no knuckles draw more syncopation from the table’s mute surface. How will I spend my time in this apartment? I know he must work. I know he must get up and put on shirts and enter buildings. In what corner of the bathtub will I wash my feet? With what face? With whose shoulders will I lean out the window? I must have a new face in this country. No longer brunette, I’m dark haired. No longer slender, I am pine. Blood. I must remind myself. We are each filled with ten pints of blood. Each person given that amount of fluid to float the spirit on. We cannot drown.

When will I know the word widow to mean woman shrouded, woman counting beads among friends, ash on her upper lip? When will I hear the word widow and not think of music, the hollowed out gourd that fits in the hand of an average-sized man? The oblong fruit gutted and dried. The deep grooves carved across its belly and played with a thin, wooden stick. Güiro. He carried it in his pocket like a pinch of salt. Each time he took it out, he held it surprised as if someone had just handed it to him. Güiro. Widow. Sound of spitting and hissing. Rain fell from the mountain into the city onto the linen of our table. We were not alone. The guitar player held anchor. I thought he was strumming until I heard music emerge from his hand. I thought there was only the night and silence and gesturing until I heard the man next to me pound his fist on the table and claim the Virgin as his own. María! he shouted and I saw her too scratching her way between the fork and the dried up fruit, breathing not from her nose or mouth, but from skins and furs as animals do.

Mia LeoninWhen I Arrive

Aparición de la Virgen

p o e T r y


MIa leoNIN’S was born in Kansas City, Missouri to a Cuban psychiatrist and a nurse from Louisville, Kentucky. Her first book of poems, Braid, was published by Anhinga Press. A second, Unraveling the Bed, will be released in April 2008 (Anhinga Press). She was awarded an Academy of American Poets Prize, has been nominated for Pushcart Prizes, and has been published in New Letters, Indiana Review, Prairie Schooner, Chelsea and Witness. She has been awarded a Money for Women Grant by the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund and was the recipient of a 2005 Florida Individual Artist Fellowship. Leonin is a full-time creative writing instructor at the University of Miami.

How will I know him? Where will I find him?In this story, there will be no other form of aquatic transport, but my plait unloosening.

Dear Sister, at three, I’m leaving.I will cast my braid toward one hundred fires and it will fan out like a net,like a mermaid’s tail.

Whoever does not help me is my enemy.

Dear Sister, I must find the man who gave me the names of slaves to choose from,my wrist, a yellow wing on slug-colored Washington Avenue.

Those who do not help me are my enemies.

I will drown the fishermen who tangle my net.I will wrap them in my dress of shells and seaweed and dive down deep. I will drown children and dissidents alike. I will drown.

Because feet need whispering, he spoke Portuguese then Spanish. He spoke between vowels and tangled reeds. Because I told him No flowers Hold out to me a new word. It would be so easy for him. Because at 4:00 p.m., he says: Que duermas con los angelitos. Impaled angels. Because he insisted quietly and I cannot resist a command.

Two Frenchmen are selling lava, tables poured from lava. Hugo, the salesman says all the other lavas of the world are too old or too young, only this lava from Mount Etna on the east coast of Sicily can make a table. Fabricio, the artisan nods enthusiastically. They sell miniature chairs and love seats of vinyl. They urge us to sit and drink from tiny cups and saucers. Because he did not get enough milk as a child, he feeds. Because I found a stem on him and together we named it No flowers Hold out to me. I don’t ask who he’s loved. I don’t want to know. I want to azul him. I want to sail him. Just one new word. He could flower me and chocolate me. My body sings him and my mind joins in. Because he didn’t get enough milk. Because my bed did not bring him closer, but the peripheries of him hovered. Willow. My body did not open him, but how the limbs took counsel around me. Because I’m worried about wasting it. I want to be sure he can make more before we use it. Because he assures me. Because I find it hard to tell him. I chatter and he is mostly silent. Because he has never told me. Because my body sings and my mind joins in. My body may be wrong. Because he didn’t get enough. Because my body may be. Because he grips my hair like a mane and leads me. It would be so easy for him to.

Because he spends his days repairing the device that keeps planes from crashing and I spend my days. Because my days are spent. Because the red neon button glows beneath his hand illuminating his fingertips. Because we have no visible presence in each other’s lives. Because No, no marks, he said. Because willow you will not always bend. Just one new word.

Unraveling the Bed

p o e T r y : M I a l e o N I N

Sigue.

I have wanted this – to be incapable in the language of my lover – to be far from fluency – just one new word.

Sigue. Sigue.

One day, Miguel happened to be standing behind the womanand he noticed a clock in her line of vision.

He continued to go to her and ask the time.He watched the children try to trick her and sometimes he did too.

A dress appears.What I thought were simple commands.

Sigue.

I have wanted this – to be praised excessively in a language I don’t understand, to crawl under a word and listen.

Sigue. In English, the literal translation would be, “keep going” but what we really say is “Don’t stop” – at the center of pleasure – its possible negation. The urge to cover one’s mouth– the impulse to shield an exclamation.

Miguel, now that my fever has lifted take me to town.(He never made it here)

Weave fruits into my hair.(What arrived were his sandals)

Miguel, carry me in a basket no matter how big I grow.(Leather shoes washed to the shore of Mile Marker #19)

Sell my hair to the farmers for water.(Orange rind rubbed into the skin. His shaved chest and hungry palms)

Miguel, when I wander off, yell for me like your child or your dog too close to the curb.(His eyes are buried in a blue boat)(His curiosity lies napping in the one-eyed woman’s lap) (His disbelief is burrowed behind her milky cataract)


p o e T r y

Adrian Castro

We reinvent ourselvessometimes counting beach pebblesor land-locked cloth holdingwater in place

The issue at hand—Geography & who has accessIdentity once you become ourswhen crossing a pinup borderthat marks you with whipping twigsThat is twigs— the first slave to ancestors the first to mast a mask of tattered breeze

At last in the Caribbeanwe can begin— Indians dressed in aviary monarchy Spanish raiment chorizo’d by jade knife stolen at Olmec sculpture (Even African everything)The cloth locked at your waist wading water(Spanish was spoken here too)illusory like thin blue pen on the ink of memory

Until tomorrow another river peruses round stones stumblingany río del CaribeFor instance a duck with waddling webbed feetarmor for feathers(they say was the prototype for feet)A borderof water & sandall locked neatly in its clothan illusion of controllike sustained music of carnival

How do footprints know the future of their feet?How does crooked beach know its balance of blue?How does the moon get fooled by white curtain?How does a child bereft

Handling Destiny: On Crossing BordersWe reinvent ourselvessometimes counting beach pebblesor land-locked cloth holdingwater in place

The issue at hand—Geography & who has accessIdentity once you become ourswhen crossing a pinup borderthat marks you with whipping twigsThat is twigs— the first slave to ancestors the first to mast a mask of tattered breeze

At last in the Caribbeanwe can begin— Indians dressed in aviary monarchy Spanish raiment chorizo’d by jade knife stolen at Olmec sculpture (Even African everything)The cloth locked at your waist wading water(Spanish was spoken here too)illusory like thin blue pen on the ink of memory

Until tomorrow another river peruses round stones stumblingany río del CaribeFor instance a duck with waddling webbed feetarmor for feathers(they say was the prototype for feet)A borderof water & sandall locked neatly in its clothan illusion of controllike sustained music of carnival

How do footprints know the future of their feet?How does crooked beach know its balance of blue?How does the moon get fooled by white curtain?How does a child bereft

IMadam I will ask you five questionsfor which you will furnish ten answers,each a permutation of the same, the one

answer of the mountains to thunder, of fishto a pelican's squawk. I will stand in my sleepand command you, O skin.

IIYesterday I lit a match, lit a Kooland shoved it into your sternum. You smiledand gave me kisses. I was pulled to a height

five times the span of heaven to hell.I saw your entirety. You lay before mecurled and post-coital. Tomorrow

I will send you twelve red jets.You can crunch them into roses.Remember me by them. I've flown.

His lines will not, like Legos, interlock to form castles or planes. His notions do not coil together like snakes in the spring, like lovers deft at loving. They growl and scratch each other and collide to raise clouds of fang and dust, like cartoon cats.

He wants to show you the shade that waits in the corpse, the tits that fly from the chests of robins. His old watch ticks he hears the wind of the watch. He has not turned that knob in 30 years, yet noon's still noon, midnight still is still.

He wants to show you fall is something climbers do, spring is what we learn from crickets, for we know only what we watch: cars go by, and the girls in the cars look at the girls in the others, who look in turn at the lookers, till all look away.

April is the coolest chick, breedingkittens in her kitchen, mixingKool-Aid and vodka, feedingher cockatiel chicken.Sweatshirts kept us warm, coveringApril in Mickey mice, squeezingher tits because she winters fat.Summer surprised us, coming out of the showernaked. We sat in her living room,smoking blunts, eating cheese.

Kemel Zaldivar

Apostrophes to the Sky

How to Read Dick Case

Poem

p o e T r y


keMel zaldIvar was born in Havana and grew up in Miami. It was at Cornell that Kemel discovered that being Cuban made him different than all the other boys and girls. He settled in New York City but somehow has ended up in Miami again. He hopes to return to the city of his birth and live the rest of his days utterly invisible. Kemel works with mentally-ill Cuban exiles in Little Havana. He occasionally pauses to write and has published poetry and prose in can we have our ball back, Shampoo, Melic, various incarnations of MiPO (ersatz Mipoesias) and other venues.

We are not interestedin erecting glass homesjagged angles to slice your hand

The neighborsare sloppy with their stone garden& prayers are unreliableuntil their bones crash with bones—

Then we can beginan earnest conversation of our time:I will show you my hand with five bonesYou show me yours

Then there is watercrisp like brass from a blacksmith’s well—it takes the form of our cupped hands

plantedin a garden only what glistens can see

II.Remember at the end of seven daysa gift of hoe & macheteused at times by your grandfatherthen again by his sonAt the end of the seven daysremember the whipping songas you with machete & hoe in handwrote on the earth diagramssignatures that would sprout shelterwords won’t lead you to obstacle’s house

Rememberwhen she had a dimpled hammock on each thighmarks from birth from years lying behinddiagrams written on her history

The Fickle Nature of Friendship


adrIaN caSTro is a poet, performer, and interdisciplinary artist. Born in Miami, Castro is the author of Cantos to Blood & Honey (Coffee House Press, 1997) and Wise Fish: Tales in 6/8 Time (Coffee House Press, 2005). He is the recipient of the State of Florida Individual Artist Fellowship, NewForms Florida, the Eric Mathieu King award from the Academy of American Poets, NALAC Arts Fellowship, and commissions from Miami Light Project and Miami Art Museum. He is also a Babalawo and herbalist.

p o e T r y : a d r I a N c a S T r o

of history make his petitionacceptable to spirits?

With gravity as backdropmore skin begins to reptileMemories drip in collective mutinya parade of quetzal feathers drums stone calendars divinationinstrumentsLanguage cuts through the persistence of yearsto form a clearepitaph—On another day we’ll smilewith multi-colored lipsshowing our shiny leopard teeth

I.They make such uncomfortable clankchild of earth child of fireThese are your tools of the tradedifficult when you use them

A large trunk with children dartingin all directionsappears slippery in its sheenadorned with thorns

There comes a day in a man’s lifewhen the machete he was given early oncan cut into small inheritancesplace them in a large calabashset them aflamespill the ashes behind himto cover his old footstepsthe one’s he stepped over & over trodden tongue lashingthe atlas of littered womenover & over every few years

Handling Destiny: Tools of the Trade


passionate literally feels like it’s coming from "thunder’s mouth." The effect is provocative, exciting, and intoxicating. Moreover, and most importantly: Leonin’s passionate poetry is endearing, thrilling, and relevent because of her skill, language, and heart. Each display of passion feels like it was approached like a study – analyzing its movement, understanding its mood, perceiving every emotion, and interpreting each like a thoughtful artist at her easel.

As an example, I introduce you to the young lover in Leonin’s poem “Florida Story.” In the waking moment of this lover’s passion, she begins removing her dress. Leonin describes this act as if she were “unbutton[ing] every dress [she’s] ever worn.”

This longing to connect, skin upon skin, and desire “to cleave to the strongest part” overwhelms her so greatly that she feels she needs to be completely naked – remove every layer of herself so she can give her truest self to her lover.

The poem “This Is Not the First Time” is another fine example of passion in Leonin’s works. It’s easy to notice the intoxicating descriptions and sexually-charged images. But it is the beautiful language and prosody in these lines that ultimately grab me:

Rhyme of wrists and ankles. Riddle of seaweed and bone: did we gallop into other skins to this same drum?

Is it rhythm or echo – this shoulder blade, this palm, moistened and folding into one?

We’ve loved before. We’ve entered the body of other bodies, traced arm-shaped shadows on a cave wall. (p.10)

Leonin uses love as a religious metaphor in many poems such as the memorable “The Repeating Garden.” At its root, this poem is a psalm of intimate connection. Leonin stages the poem in the mystical Garden of Eden and her narrator, becomes a modern-day Eve.

I adore the masterful title because it suggests that the life-altering events that occurred to Eve in the Garden are repeated by every woman who longs for connection and the desire to eat of the forbidden fruit. This is apparent in the poem’s introduction, in which Leonin quotes Helene Cixous: “For us, eating and being eaten belong to the terrible secret of love.”

But it is Leonin’s own line that adds abundant insight into Eve’s enhanced feelings and her blossoming sexuality: “She tastes desire in every living thing.”

Indeed, Leonin seems to be saying that desire, the passion to taste of the forbidden fruit is intrinsically natural. In the companion poem "Apple," she defines passion most amazingly: “Love, without hunger is a need without ache.” [p.9]

And it is this ache that Leonin instills so thoughtfully upon her innocent Eve of “The Repeating Garden.” Consider this stanza as an example: “Beneath the fruit, a palm – a hand waits on the other side of her appetite./ To touch him under the wing – his other throat./ Is it fragile or painful? Will it startle him toward her?”

Simply beautiful.

In regards to Eve’s desire for connection, it is manifested throughout the poem, but most vividly in the beginning stanza:“She lingers and presses her back into tree trunks in hopes of fusion, an exchange of calcium and wisdom…” [p. 5]

Besides the themes of “The Repeating Garden,” highlighting Eve’s and Adam’s transformation from innocence to experience, I am also delighted in the poem’s skillful prosody. Leonin changes the meter and rhythm in the middle of the poem. The first half of the poem, for example, exhibits long, pregnant lines that echo the narrator’s innocence. In

r e v I e w

the invention of skin

Love, Magic and Miracle in Mia Leonin’s Poetry

a review by Michael Parker“...[L]ove reveals a repeated fury.”

It is upon this concept that Mia Leonin begins her bewitching collection, Unraveling the Bed. It is a stunning and weighty line, taken from Pablo Neruda’s poem “Integrations,” in which themes range from international unity and the struggle of life as it integrally connects with nature, nation, and freedom.

In the poems, stories, and even the spoken word of her collection, Leonin stays away from these weightier themes and those of a few of the well-recognized Cuban-American poets -- independence and freedom (Reinaldo Arenas); the resistance to orthodoxy (Octavio Armand); isolation, loss, and alienation (Lourdes Casal); exile, migration, heritage, Cuba’s “disharmony with the world,” and the essence of Cuba in the literary collective (Pablo Medina, Elías Miguel Muñoz, Jorge Reyes); and socio-political concerns, particularly those of conformity (Angel Cuadro).

Instead, Leonin tackles the lighter, yet highly arduous task of interpreting love. Under the auspices of love, Leonin specifically highlights desire, longing, and the

sexual connection. She also stunningly analyzes sub-themes such as love as service; love as the religious experience; and love as the brilliant chameleon set against the fierce play of love – the joy and peace; the hunger and longing; the sacred act and the shared meal; and the magic and the miracle..

With this in mind, it is perfectly fitting that Leonin echoes Neruda’s description of love -- that it is a fierceness that haunts us. Why? I give you three reasons: 1) because it is absolutely true. 2) Because it is a subject that could grow a library’s-worth of writings. And, 3) because Leonin establishes a true psychological sense of place we are all intimately familiar with – after all, we are human; we are the grand, complex "invention of skin" bedevilled by seemingly hard-coded instincts.

Of all the themes resonating within this work, the most resounding is passion. I am reminded of a line in Shakespeare’s King John. "O that my tongue were in the thunder’s mouth! Then with passion would I shake the world..." [3.4.38-40]

Leonin’s display and description of all things

Far Away To Dream of Me?” creates a miracle by “divid[ing] [her]self into loaves [and] conjuring soup from bone.”

Likewise, the wonderful story “Soup and Bread” highlights the shared meal theme, exhibiting the quality of the “we take care of our own” community ideal often spoken of in regards to the exiled community. In the story “Soup and Bread,” the narrator visits her ill friend Angela, who is a recently divorced single-mother recovering from an operation (a procedure that won’t allow her to "be able to have any more children”).

“Angela drinks from the water glass filled with sleep. She drinks half and gives the other half to Gabriella,” her daughter. This is the visual interpretation of Angela’s sorrow and suffering.

The narrator never reveals her name, she remains anonymous, generic, like an “Every(wo)man” -- “not a midwife...not a helper or doer of good deeds. [But] [w]hen needed, rise[s] to the occasion...I do my work. I tend to my loved ones.”

What strikes me about this story is how believable and realistic Leonin creates these fully-developed characters, particularly how each is (directly or indirectly) affected by the human condition – the way we choose to react to the multifarious episodes of life,

cruel or otherwise.

I see evidence of this in this line: “[Angela will] return to work after four years. She’ll take the hands of strangers into her own, as many as possible.”

These two sentences lend such depth to Angela -- we know her needs, her life, her attitude, etc. We sense that she’s been imprisoned in her house for four years and has been so long removed from society, possibly even from the human touch of friendly hands, that she longs to hold as many hands as she possibly can.

But at the heart of “Soup and Bread” is the act of love. “When everything goes wrong, make soup.”

Symbolically, for the narrator, this act of cooking is an act of healing. Leonin’s narrator explains: “I’ve never prayed into a soup, but my arm circles in threes. Pinch of paprika. Circle in threes. Handful of onion. Three times. Oregano. Bay leaf. Parsley flakes.”

The abundance of the number three – “Everything must be done in threes” – evokes the holiness of The Trinity, of the unity of the body, the mind, and the soul. It’s a symbol of wholeness. It is the mystical concept of eternity – that we circle about the perimeter of the ring of the past, present, and future.

Indeed, “Soup and Bread” is a story of many like-minded themes: It’s a rally cry for peace and healing,

r e v I e w b y M I c h a e l p a r k e r

the second half, on the other hand, the rhythm, the staccato alliteration, and shortened stanzas echo the transformation into experience – seeming to mimic the quick patterns and rhythms of intercourse. I’m including, as an example of this, a string of stanzas for your review. Note how Leonin’s descriptions and imagery captivate.

Hooved and throated, she gallops with his name flying behind her.

She prays. She dances. She compounds her prayers with a sucking gesture. She holds fruit in the palm of her hand.

And he eats: into fractions and decimals into psalms and leftover sandwiches, twigs and damp soil.

He eats. He follows. He runs along side her. He loses count. **** She mates. She doubles her venus.

She eats. She glistens and skips. She triples her grief.

She commands that milk and honey flow from thistle, that flying animals invert their wings.

She commands her body to lift the weight of its joy.

They lie down. They cannot rise.

She swallows a flame. He invents the candle.

She turns over and over in her sleep. He invents the wheel.

She gives off light. The crowning begins.

What will we call it? He asks.

How will we join it to our hips? She answers.

The wind lifts their wrists. Leaves rustle and rise up orange.

She holds the fire in his throat and he eats.

I simply adore these closing lines in which Eve passes on her passion to Adam, in the form of “fire in his throat.” And that he partakes of the "fire" from Eve’s hand lends, yet again, a beautiful insight into the Adam and Eve story. Poetically, this closing couplet is another magnificent example of Leonin’s poetic voice and imagery.

Another religious metaphor prominent throughout Unraveling the Bed is the act of eating, particularly the shared-meal-as-miracle concept (in which a meal is created out of something of small availabilty, offered out of compassion, and gladly received and partaken.)

The significance of the shared meal is that it exhibited the accessibility of God’s grace, the nurturing/healing qualities of the communal meal, and the inclusiveness of the invitation around God’s table, representative of the divine community (Kingdom).[1]

We sense these qualities, particularly the accessibility of God, in Leonin’s touching poem “Memory of Fire,” in which Leonin remembers her mother and her mother’s faith: “On the days she prayed,/I watched her hair spill around her face./God tumbled into pieces at her knees/and she gathered him in her dress.”

The shared meal theme is also visible when Eve feeds Adam the "fire" of passion ("The Repeated Garden"); and when the narrator of the poem “Are You Too

Cover art for Unraveling the Bed by Heriberto Mora.

Unraveling the Bed includes a CD of Leonin

performing her works to original music by Carlos

Ochoa. The samples provided me were professionally

engineered. Leonin’s poetry mingled very nicely with

hip melodies. I caught myself dancing and swaying to

their captivating beats.

Unraveling the Bed is published by Anhinga Press,

2008.

Footnotes

1. Crossan, John Dominic. The Historical Jesus: The

Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant. Harper Collins,

San Francisco. 1992.


r e v I e w b y M I c h a e l p a r k e r

feeding the impoverished and the ill among us. It is about finding ways to help stop the flowing of blood, stop overreacting and turning “a divorce” into a tragic death scene “for the TV news.” It’s also about “[t]urn[ing] off the war.”

In closing, there are three poignant points Leonin’s collection calls to mind:

1) The skillful and honest poet is a powerful transforming force. When they earn our trust, we, in return, let them gather us quite naturally as an autumn wind gathers fallen leaves, or hold us as the horizons hold together the sky. And so often, we hand over our heart to them because we trust they’ll care for it. This is my reaction to Mia Leonin’s skill and honest subject matter. She earned in me the level of trust I just explained.

2) If a reader is to be enchanted, there must be elements of the extraordinary – poetic language that opens the new country; metaphor that continually awakens the mind, stretches you to learn; fresh imagery that expands your view; and thoughtfullness that breathes a new spirit into our easily-worn and world-wearied souls.

Teresa Longo, in her introduction to the collection of essays “Pablo Neruda and the U.S. Culture Industry,” perfectly describes my thoughts about Mia Leonin’s poetic skill and voice:

“The ’best poet,’ according to Pablo Neruda, is the one who sustains us with our daily bread–with the hopes and dreams of poetry. He sustains us in much the same way that the ’majestic and overflowing’ sea might sustain ’the meager communities which gather hungrily on the shores.’” [Routledge, New York, 2002, page xix]

3) The poet must be honest because there comes a

moment early on in any poem where the reader can

sense the poet owns the experience– they’ve walked

miles in its shoes. In her long poem “The Invention of

Skin (A Conversation in Canvas),” Leonin masterfully

explains the skill of honesty of a poet’s work: “As if

all these years, I’ve been thinking with only my face./

As if I’ve never broken off words and dived down,/

their shorn letters glowing between the hands.”

Regarding the skill of honesty in Leonin’s work,

I’m most impressed with the closing lines of her

magnificent poem “When I Arrive,” in which Leonin

seems to speak to the exiled community. “I must have

a new face in this country,” she writes. “No longer

brunette, I’m dark/haired. No longer slender, I am

pine. Blood. I must remind myself. We/ are each

filled with ten pints of blood. Each person given

that amount of fluid to float the spirit on. We cannot

drown.” (p.31)

Leonin’s honesty, her ability to think beyond her

“face” and see her subject matter “glowing between

the hands” creates utterly inspiring language and

timeless poetry.

The famous Greek tragedian Euripides said of love:

“love is all we have.” At the core of Mia Leonin’s

“Unraveling the Bed,” love isn’t just all we have; it’s

the source of our humanity.

Poetry can read like a great river. This collection, on

the other hand, is more intimate and vital: it is like a

heartbeat. Here is a joyous collection! And here is an

impressive poet whose star just may be rising into a

more prominent space of sky.

*********************************************

Before making contact,

the invisible lightning arc sizzles

across inches.

And Jesus said, "Who touched me?"

When have you felt ether

fall from you like reflex?

Out of your skin

and into the flesh and space of another

like gravity

bound at each end by a string

with fish hooks politely forcing

a minimum distance

crackling and white is

the baited touch of a woman’s skin.

And after that, the stare of Eve

and after that, the sweet smell of apple

and after that, the fate of all my fathers.

Superfluous Touch (while riding the metro)


dIeGo QuIroS started writing poetry to express his imaginative and distinctive understanding of the world, the self, the places, beliefs and fantasies that make the fabric of a person.

He credits his poetry to conversations with a Muse he describes as “a naked woman with long dark green hair, green eyes, and light green skin”. He claims she walks around his home in South Florida while he writes, and drops subtle whispers here and there.

Along the old slums wherethe ruined shutters hanga grouper exits a windowswallows a whole yellowtailswims towards the next building.

Below the kill, a garland of algaehangs on a barnacled street sign,a school of sardines gathers abovethe walk-don’t walk pedestrian signat the corner of the four lane street.

The sun shines above the waters.It feels like summer. Year roundthe mermaids lay eggs whilearcheologists mermen dive kitchendrawers seeking small tridents.

We could never agree on muchyou and I. Even when motherwas ill, we argued over her health.You said it was car sicknessI said it was years of smoking.

The doctor said it was heat strokethe politician said she was finethe priest said it was incestkept blabbering the rhetoricof how long ago they climbed

the ark two by two, and fled higher.Even while we watched the newswe could not agree on how to keepthe polar ice caps frozen.Now it doesn’t matter.

Even the rainbow has fled.

That afternoon the wind

turned trees to bone,

cut my face with leaves.

Every butterfly became a sail

and I became a prophet,

predicting it would topple

a dream house built from clouds.

Butterflies have returned since.

My face has healed.

The wind replaced the space

my body filled, and pushed

my half of the sky along with yours.

Diego QuirosThe Sun Wind

p o e T r y


Apparition week we pan and brown

bag acres of relics: dainty saint’s feet

crush the snake, espadrilles charm the tarsi, glorious mysteries

darn the holes in our souls… if we’re walking

exotica, our tastes fun

fervently Catholic.Guilt meadows as the slitter heaps of faithful marchinjured and ill-dressed:jumbled limbs assisting toothless feats.Keepsake crutches snap and the voodoo of thislimping carnival slumps; we pick through what’s left.Mice. We tweeze threadsnursing a long blessed line to the cataract of pure water flowingopposite of desire. Sparrows. We scoop the eleven tear drops in the mist.Pilgrims sewn from a sloppy blanket-stitch unravel before their petqueen, Our Lady of the Plasticized Leg. The Hobble. Cripple.Raise the cheesecloth to her gown.Sift for offerings, rusty thumb, eye, lung.Tear open a crinoline wound.Umbrella her fleet of medals, floatingvotives in a raspberry of vinegars.With weak knees guiding the blade, with breasts on a plate—this is mythicecstacy! Neck snared,your delicates clipped by holy week’szipper of ashes.

Fit of Cypress on the Dirt Hill


krISTINa MarTINez has most recently been published in The Indiana Review, The Iowa Review, and the Editor’s Choice issue of Tigertail, A South Florida Poetry Annual.

Her family, the Lopez clan—Manuel, Maria, Martha, and Gina—arrived in Florida from Cuba in October 1956. In February 2008, her grandparents celebrated their sixtieth wedding anniversary.

Jewel me in rough-cut ruby

ambulances that jump the tracks you’ve tied my ankles to.

Beard me with Spanish moss, a sideshow of graying mermaid tresses.

Museum my feet so they won’t grow.

Quick as a Barbie shoe, I’m off

again—guilt is sweet

as those sweet king cakes.

Escape’s on the tongue, no bribe wild enough

to keep me from running.

Like a red and white tarpaulin, my thirst balloons.

I zebra the sawtooth popcorn bag, I caterpillar and shirr

my turncoat raft off the pillowed lip of a hurricane… no more aviary, no more vanities.

Clasp chandelier tears, decanters, cruets of sherry

vinegar until my cross pianos

the splintering straits. Bury me in Florida.

Though my limbs rot,

my peg leg’ll propel me towards Sierra Maestra,

my ox-cart slippers treading Poinciana,

my loyalties open season.

Kristina MartinezThe Escape Artist Otherwise Known as Our Lady of Charity

p o e T r y


Jewel me in rough-cut ruby

ambulances that jump the tracks you’ve tied my ankles to.

Beard me with Spanish moss, a sideshow of graying mermaid tresses.

Museum my feet so they won’t grow.

Quick as a Barbie shoe, I’m off

again—guilt is sweet

as those sweet king cakes.

Escape’s on the tongue, no bribe wild enough

to keep me from running.

Like a red and white tarpaulin, my thirst balloons.

I zebra the sawtooth popcorn bag, I caterpillar and shirr

my turncoat raft off the pillowed lip of a hurricane… no more aviary, no more vanities.

Clasp chandelier tears, decanters, cruets of sherry

vinegar until my cross pianos

the splintering straits. Bury me in Florida.

Though my limbs rot,

my peg leg’ll propel me towards Sierra Maestra,

my ox-cart slippers treading Poinciana,

my loyalties open season.

p o e T r y

Rita Maria MartinezI opened a can of alphabet soupand searched for clues in letters like life preservers in broth.I watched the evening news expectingher body in a lake, her bleached hair smeared across the water’s surface smooth as straw. I fingered the kitchencounter, decrypted each cookie crumb. I checked the billiard table pockets, behind the bathroom mirror,between the lampshade’s pleats. Later, I dreamt my left foot was bootless,bruised by gravel when I read hersignature in the quiet grace of a passing cloud.

Reading Jane Eyre

Jane’s grown weary of lingeried mannequins, of women spritzing her like exterminators,

of Burdines, Macys, Saks blazing before her.Sweat pools beneath each plum-sized

breast as she crosses a continent of asphalt to reach the rented Honda, its treacherous

seat belt that digs into her shoulder like a cheap bra.She sits in silence waiting for the traffic light’s

transformation from heat wave to go-gowhen Eddie’s crumpled, razor-burned face

appears in the rear view mirror, his scarred forehead hot as the steering wheel against her fingertips.

She parts her lips, ready to stitch soothing syllables across the steaming cicatrix, sew secrets

into his skin, a grocery list of things she wishes to forget: the gold digger got suckered

Jane Eyre’s Fashion Remedy

rITa MarIa MarTINez was born in Miami and lives in Ft. Lauderdale with husband Todd Puccio; the two met at an open-mike night at Saint Gregory Catholic Church where Martinez read a poem. She tutors students at Nova Southeastern University.

Rita Maria’s poetry has appeared in Gulf Stream, Ploughshares, Gargoyle, Diagram, and Tigertail: A South Florida Poetry Anthology. It is also featured in the eighth edition of Stephen Minot’s Three Genres: The Writing of Fiction/Literary Nonfiction, Poetry, and Drama (Prentice Hall) and in Burnt Sugar, Caña Quemada: Contemporary Cuban Poetry in English and Spanish (Simon & Schuster).

Martinez’s first chapbook, Jane-in-the-Box, is forthcoming from March Street Press later this year.

I’ve always believed that great lesbian writers write it all: poetry, fiction, essays, news stories. We have much to tell the world, and it cannot be contained in a single genre. Achy Obejas is another who proves this to be true. The publication of her first collection of poetry by A Midsummer Night’s Press demonstrates Obejas’ skill as a poet in conjunction with her award-winning work as a novelist and short story writer.

This Is What Happened in Our Other Life contains fifteen poems; all are intimate lyrics about love. Obejas’ poems are both narrative and musical. They often assert their power with an initial line that draws the reader into the poem with equal parts of directness and surprise. For instance, the poem “Legacies” opens the collection; it begins “The first time I was inside a woman,...” Provocative, yes. Then, in the second line, Obejas turns in a different direction and writes “I was confused.” Each line of the poem provokes and releases tension, insisting that the reader proceed to the next one. Thus begins the journey for the reader.

Obejas is a master of lineation, using it to elicit greater dramatic tension, to control the pacing of the poems in the eyes and ears of readers, and to demonstrate her prowess at creating perfectly conceived lines. Long after the collection has been read, reread, and savored, particular lines by Obejas linger: “All of your lovers come to you in April,” “You check your correspondence and the world on the screen” and “the world breaks us all.” She packages knowledge and revelation into her poems in ways that are both dramatic and memorable.

Obejas’ skill as a poet is not limited to lineation, however. Her attention to the sonic qualities of the language are striking in this collection. Internal rhyme certainly figures into her work, as does assonance and consonance, the usual tools of the free-verse, lyric poet.

In Obejas’ hands, however, these tools are used with care, and the results of her applied labors are fresh and new. In “Dancing in Paradise,” Obejas writes of the body’s need to preserve memory, “we keep our eyes open,/ears keen, for marine smells[.]” The direct visual

rhyme of “open” and “keen” are counterpointed by the slant rhyme between “open” and “marine.” Both echo astutely in the eye and the ear in conjunction with the direct aural rhyme of “keen” and “marine.” Similarly, in “Sleeping Apart,” an unregulated rhyme scheme emerges rhyming “time-zone” and “telephone” and “dances” and “distance;” this subtle end rhyme serves to unite the lovers unexpectedly and delightfully by the poems conclusion.

Obejas careful attention to the sounds of her work not only demonstrates her skill as a poet but also reminds the reader that the journey through these poems is one controlled by the hands of the craftswoman whose skills transform words into art and the craftswoman into an artisan.

Perhaps the greatest power of this collection is its restraint. With only fifteen poems, each feels perfectly conceived and thoroughly complete. Spare and compressed are accurate descriptors for all of the poems, and the package itself responds to these attributes. A Midsummer Night’s Press has produced a small, perfect-bound book. For print fetishists, it is certain to be the object of great affection. It measures about the size of a 4"x6" photograph, but it is not meant to be placed in an album; it is meant to be treasured and to be fondled. Obejas is lucky to have such care given to her first printed book of poetry and A Midsummer Night’s Press is likewise lucky to have Obejas’ collection for the first installment of their Body Language series.

—————————

Julie R. Enszer is a poet and writer based in University Park, MD. You can read more of her work at JulieREnszer.com.

THIS IS WHAT HAPPENED IN OUR OTHER LIFE by Achy Obejas

Midsummer Night’s Press / 978-0979420825 / 32 pps / $6.95

M I c r o - r e v I e w

of bleeding hearts from the earth’s damp mouth.

The man who lusts after your mind—only—who finagled you

into giving up German to learn Hindustani

so the two of you can get hitched, jet to India, and save the world,

stands before you stiff as a ceramic groom for the top tier

of your wedding cake. The cassock drapes across his legs

like a bell-shaped flower. You could bury your face in the quiet

of each fold, each delicate crease unfurling at the sound of your voice,

at the slightest graze of a curious fingertip, but he expects

you to register for Whitecliff or Wedgewood ASAP,

for the cobalt crystal water jug, goblets and sherry glasses,

matching champagne flutes. He wants you to tie the knot

in a Princess Di knock-off, the silk ivory crepe evening dress

and jacket auctioned at Christie’s, or a satin floral brocade

with a scoop neck and cathedral length skirt—but you can’t even blink

or move, like when Bertha snuck into your room and lurked

over your four-post bed and you thought she’d slit

your throat with her glittery ghetto nails. Instead, the klepto

lifted your Vera Wang veil, a gift from Eddie. You were afraid

of winding up like her brother, Mason, his chest unzipped,

on the bare mattress like a yellow-tailed snapper waiting

to be gutted. You were afraid of falling asleep, of nightmares—

bloody sponges floating in basins, Bertha opening her mouth to flash

a sharp fang until you woke up burdened, limbs to the mattress

like a circus elephant manacled to the ground.

If it were up to Miss Loony Tunes she’d rip that row of shiny buttons

right off JR’s cassock, sink her claws into his tender torso

like barbs of stinging nettle, like hooked bristles along the edge of the cutgrass,

he’d learn the difference between yes and no, between I do and I don’t.


p o e T r y : r I T a M a r I a M a r T I N e z

into a sour deal, landed a Loch Ness monster,a loony jezebel, a homicidal hoochie, hysterical

juju woman, schitzo, succubus, suicidal skank to have and to hold, to love and to honor,

to cherish and obey la sucía hidden like the mole on his inner thigh, like mothballs beneath the bed,

like the leftover plate of lasagna forgotten in the freezer. If she takes him back, he’ll beg for forgiveness,

he’ll say he loves her, he’ll take liberties,call her Janet or Janey, though she hates it,

he’ll shower her with garter belts from Victoria’s Secret as if sprinkling croutons

across salad, he’ll decorate her like a Christmas tree,insist she wear the silver arm cuff, those topaz

earrings that dangle from her lobes like fishing lures.When he gets bored he’ll scrunch her in his hands

like a candy bar wrapper, toss her in his fishbowl.It’s good I’m safe, she thinks, as she removes

her lips from the mirror, grabs her bottle of Evianfrom the car’s cup holder and chugs.

It’s good you’re in there and I’m out here, she tells Eddie, as she licks her lips and the light blinks green.

You’ve waited for a proposal since playing house

and roaming Aunt Reed’s herb garden in your nightgown,

wearing a white pillowcase for a veil as you plucked

sweet peas, a collar of eucalyptus leaves, a sprig

Saint John Rivers Pops the Question on Jane Eyre


How to Paint a Cuban DreamSit your mother downand offer her a glass of scotch.Contrary to popular beliefwe drink scotch. Not rum.We prefer to have what wecan't have. Let the vacationershave our rum. Let Russiahave our sandy beaches.Let Mao Tse-Tung have our tobacco.

Take out the green.There is always greenlike the fields of sugar cane.I never run of out green.

Green is the base of everything.Including this face with eyes closed.She does not speak my language.She is high. Her eyes are closed.Green keeps refilling itself.It is endless like cocaine.

My mother starts to rememberthings I wish to forget.The memory of my fatherloosens her tongue.I do not want to tell herabout the ghost in the corner.I tell him to keep.

She says that her husband died.I remind her that she was already divorced.Green is brushed on inwide strokes with abandonment.

She says it does not matter.I tell her he tried to kill us.She is shocked as if she was never there.Then he was crazy she says.Yes he was.

We agree and move on to orange.Smaller strokes are placed on cheeks.It is sunny in Florida right now.I am not there.I am here in this basement withmy mother, the ghost and this faceI do not recognize.

This face I do not recognizeuntil I subconsciously paintpalm tree branches for her hair.Her eyes are mameys.Her lips are papayas.

I don't rememberwhat brought me here.

My mother saysI sat on the seat nextto her on the TWA plane.My sister, on my father's lap.

Sit your mother downand offer her a glass of scotch.Contrary to popular beliefwe drink scotch. Not rum.We prefer to have what wecan't have. Let the vacationershave our rum. Let Russiahave our sandy beaches.Let Mao Tse-Tung have our tobacco.

Take out the green.There is always greenlike the fields of sugar cane.I never run of out green.

Green is the base of everything.Including this face with eyes closed.She does not speak my language.She is high. Her eyes are closed.Green keeps refilling itself.It is endless like cocaine.

My mother starts to rememberthings I wish to forget.The memory of my fatherloosens her tongue.I do not want to tell herabout the ghost in the corner.I tell him to keep.

She says that her husband died.I remind her that she was already divorced.Green is brushed on inwide strokes with abandonment.

She says it does not matter.I tell her he tried to kill us.She is shocked as if she was never there.Then he was crazy she says.Yes he was.

We agree and move on to orange.Smaller strokes are placed on cheeks.It is sunny in Florida right now.I am not there.I am here in this basement withmy mother, the ghost and this faceI do not recognize.

This face I do not recognizeuntil I subconsciously paintpalm tree branches for her hair.Her eyes are mameys.Her lips are papayas.

I don't rememberwhat brought me here.

My mother saysI sat on the seat nextto her on the TWA plane.My sister, on my father's lap.

Photo: Dulce and Ivonne at a cousin's wedding. Tio Galo and his daughter Jennifer in the background.

I grew up in a cult.

We were the minority.Then the whole city became the cult.

Other cults tried to take over the city.They dressed in orange and red,shaved their heads,sang songs at the airport.Their tambourines jingling in the airbetween the baggage claim and the tourists.

Unlike them,my cult was submissive.We tried not to stick out.

Although most of the outsidersthought we were loud and boisterous,we were quiet between ourselves.There was unification in our cause.A silent understanding of whathad to be done.

And so, we set outto infiltrate the universities.We earned the degreesin the language of the locals.We built houses, temples,churches, schools.

We renamed the streetsto the names of the executed.We married and procreatedand taught our offspringthe language of the cult.

Some of us infiltratedNew Jersey and Chicago.Our community there was notas vivacious as the city we took over.

And there I lived.In that city among my cultuntil one day I had to leave.

And so it was written.

I settled in the prairie.Where the seasons changed.Where there was no shore to escape to.No shore to wait for others to arrive.

And here my offspringwill grow among the corn stalks.Quiet and Americanand I will never look back.

Dulce MenendezMiami

p o e T r y

dulce (dIdI) MeNeNdez was born in 1960, weighing in at 9lbs, 11oz. Her birth almost caused the death of her mother Salome. Salome was stronger than the doctors thought, and one year later Dulce’s sister, Ivonne, arrived. Salome had not picked out the name of Ivonne for her second daughter. The name Ivonne (Ivan) was chosen by Pepe (Salome’s brother-in-law), who had to put in paperwork to claim his brother Pablo, sister-in-law and two nieces still in Cuba. Having left one year earlier at age 19 with his mother (Etelvina) and younger brother Galo (age 13), Pepe thought it safe to use a name that may be for a boy or a girl. Salome, Dulce, Ivonne and Pablo finally left the island on June 15, 1962. Dulce was one month short of turning two, and Ivonne was 9 months old. The family settled in Miami, but later Salome left with her two daughters to High Point, North Carolina. They lived there for a short time and went back to Miami only to leave again a year later for Los Angeles, where Dulce and Ivonne attended Santa Monica Elementary. Salome, Dulce and Ivonne left California in 1969 for Miami, and they stayed there for the next six years when Salome divorced Pablo. In 1975, the three returned to California where Dulce and Ivonne attended Hollywood High School (class of ’78 and ’79).

Since then, marriages, children, divorces and the death of Pablo Menendez have taken place.

Dulce Menendez is happily single and the proud parent of four children. Besides holding a full-time job and being a parent, Didi publishes this magazine, writes an

occasional poem and submerges all her extra energies into her oil paintings. This is the first time she has dedicated an issue of MiPOesias Magazine solely to her own people.

Photo: Ivonne celebrates her first birthday in Miami, Florida, October 12, 1962. Etelvina is standing behind the girls.

A certain slim-hipped Cuban boy loved to wrap his tongue around my brain, spew obscenities in my ear,words I relished more than sex, his SpanishRicky Ricardo smoothAy, Mami que rica estas,the whole thing so wrongit just made me wetter.

I wasn’t la niña bonita my parents wanted me to be, hands tangled in suds and Brillo,the kind who waited.

I counted the minutes for lover boy to stroke me down the long length of a coiled telephone cordstretched tautinto the laundry room,where I became the girl who let herself be pushedinto the ladies room at Woolworth’s,the one who said nothing

laid flat on a bench in the Kiwanis dugout, scant kisses giving way to Kleenex that cleaned me right up for the quiet ride home.

Arby’s got you talking. Something about that ten-gallon hat inspired courage and you glowed like the cocuyos we caught in glass jars that summer you were ten and sure Papi was right about everything, including me,

black sheep of the family. I shoveledfries down my throat like a gravedigger.You unearthed confessions. Meteors that streaked past your lips. Explosions: I may not graduate; we never use condoms; he grabs, but almost never hits.

Geese do it too, tuck their heads beneath a pall of fluff to keep from noticing danger: Styrofoam cups fooling little ones into strangled bites; silent swim of alligators proving lethal beneath the green guise of indifference.

On the way home, I spun sentences into webs sticky with logic, You’re too young, He’s no good for you. You swept them away with bristles long practiced at the art of clean-up and said, We have to go back, I forgot my purse.I rolled my eyes and turned around.

How could I have missed it?The universe saying, Do it again, pulling us into the same parking spot, through the same double doors, back to a moment redolent with grease and regret. A miracle, like your purse, still there, intact.

I threw stones. I could have saved them,planted a rock garden, sentries to guard against erosion. We could be there now, weeds blooming into flowers, talking about nothing, nothing at all.

PutaErosion for Zelda

My Papi was too cheapand my Mami too weakto celebrate my quinces in the grand fashion of my friends who enjoyed parents willing to mortgage the house to peddle their pochungitas into the right social circles, but I didn’t mind;I had been to The Biltmore,where the super rich threw their soirees, had seen a particular Cuban-American Princess descend on a zirconium-studded quarter-moon bringing forth a gasp as the birthday girl smiled and tipped back, cracked her head on Italian marble, and once,at the Big Five Club, where underwater ballerinas could be had for an extra 300 bucks,I saw a water nymph slam back three shots of tequila before show time, the party busted up by el rescue who came to resuscitate herback into the horror of a shrieking fifteen-year-old, a thousand layers of sodden lavender pooling at her feet, the kind of chiffon I’d never seen at Angelita’s Salon De Quinces

in Hialeah, my favorite of all the quince spots, where third-generation cousins gathered for generic booze, dressed to the same shabby nines,whooping it up as they waitedfor the pink scallop shell to open drawbridge slow, reveal a perky pearl, rouged and posed on velvet, compulsory crinolines, organza fanned out beneath a crunchy taffeta gown, trumpeting the arrival of another available Cubanita, corseted assets waiting to be plucked by any one of the red-palmed boys lining the walls.

Caridad McCormickQuinceñera

p o e T r y


carIdad MccorMIck was born in Los Angeles in 1969 to Cuban parents who never let her forget that although she was a first generation American, she was, first and foremost, una niña Cubana.

At nine, she moved to Miami and stopped wanting to be blonde and blue-eyed. She began to write about her experiences with the subject she knew best: Cubanita 101.

Caridad’s poetry has appeared in The Seattle Review, Slipstream, CALYX, Spillway, The Pedestal, Susan B. and Me: An International Collection of Writing and Tigertail: A South Florida Poetry Annual, IV. In 2006 she was a finalist for the Rita Dove Poetry Award, and in 2007, she was the recipient of a Florida Artist Fellowship. She teaches English for Dade County Public Schools and is a professor of English at Miami Dade College.

The mile markers countdown [ 55 | 54 | 53 ] while Nikki and I sail in her Plymouth Fury, firing 8-cylinders over a 30-foot swath of pavement, cutting through saltwater marshes and clutches of mangrove islands, on our way to Key West for New Year’s eve this year, again [ 47 | 46 | 45 ]. We cross from key to key, over the same bridges necklacing the same islands together, under the same braille of stars, past the road sign near Bahia Honda: key deer habitat: 49 deer remaining. Last year there were 90, Nikki reminds me, and tells me her story again, as if they were already extinct: how she remembers them at summer camp standing no taller than a car tire, how precious they were, how she fed them cabbage, how they ate out of her hands, how she was ordered to clang pots and scare them away so they’d keep wild and keep surviving. We keep speeding through conversations, changing topics every mile [ 44 | 43 | 42 ] on chit-chat about BMWs, the Black Forest, chocolate [ 41 | 40 | 39 ] on her gourmet mom’s coq-a-vin, my mother’s Cuban ajiaco stew [ 38 | 37 | 36 ] on children, China, nuclear war, and then: the inevitable, great-road-trip-cosmic-hypo-philosophical question about the aging sun eventually turning into a red giant and engulfing the earth. We don’t answer it by slipping in a CD, turning the volume all the way up, knowing all we can do is drive and survive, like everything out here: the last 49 key deer nibbling berries on either side of US-1, the snarls of mangrove roots clinging to each other in the sand, and the two of us singing our way south through the darkness again, to watch the plaster conch at Sloppy Joe’s countdown [ 10 | 9 | 8 ] to make cheap champagne toasts in plastic cups, and embrace each other amid the crowd on Duvall Street, one more time, one more year, even if the sun explodes.

‘til you go to nugget’s on St. ann. So we go there, and there’s nothingfancy: a splintered bass, a piano aching for varnish, and drums lostbehind a dust-filled spotlight beamed on a woman dressed in forget-me-not colors, her voice a blend of cider, saffron, clove, and mentheliquoring up our ears, her face like a cameo masking the disorderof living a life that’s felt every second—maybe that’s the reason

everyone always says there’s nothing like n’awlins, you’ll never forget it:—to abandon order for the sake of a song, and find meaningin a voice, even if it keeps sing’n: ain’t no reas’n…ain’t no reas’n…

Even If the Sun Explodes


for N.M.

We’re driving 900 miles, 23 counties in 17 hours, for a reason.Perhaps it’s our need to feel like nothing through the nothingof pasture land as flat as the tarmac on the highway, to be lostlike an x through the x’s of Loxley and Biloxi, or simply to forget, like so many exit-number towns that have forgotten the meaningof their Indian names. At the Shoney’s near Tampa we order

lunch, instead of breakfast. The waitress smirks: there ain’t no orderI can’t handle, and in my metropolis mind I just can’t find a reasonwhy she hasn’t tossed her name plate, left this place with nothing to offer her. The way we left everything behind us, to be as lostand incidental as last night, down I-70 doing 80 and forgetting under the stars hitting the windshield without those meanings

we usually assign to them—hope|dream|awe—against the meanof our averaged lives and days that feel like the flashing orders

on the billboards—sleep here|eat this|exit now—without reason.Perhaps it’s that nothingness driving us to believe in somethingness,and that’s why we’re on the road, searching out what we’ve lostby losing ourselves, and remembering ourselves by forgetting

who we are, concerned only with tuning-in a station to forgetthe miles left to go with Elvis preachers claiming we’re meantfor love and the Kingdom of Heaven long as we follow Jesus’ orders.And even though I don’t believe, I begin conjuring up reasonsfor my sins, as if I should forgive myself for wanting nothingmore than this easy ride on a holiday weekend. So we’re lost

lambs for a while in the big easy without a map, but we don’t lose a minute of the Bourbon St. circus of sax and tap, before getting Hurricanes and voodoo dolls, and donning beads at a meal meantfor a Cajun king: crawfish gumbo and catfish, followed by an orderof beigné at Café Du Monde on the miss, thinking: is this the reasonwe came…is this it? When our waiter says: you haven’t heard nothing

Richard BlancoNew Orleans Sestina Against Order

p o e T r y


I do not know if my great-grandfather’s eyeswere green or brown or blue, or what he sawof his life in the cold rivers of Austurias. And though my blood has always imagined himas a shepherd or a farm hand in a gray wool vest with a beret lowered to his brow, I cannot tell youwhy he left, if he cried watching the fog retreatthrough the hills of his village into the heavensfor the last time from the window of a train moving south through twilight toward Sevilla.Was it for a woman he knew and I would knowdecades later as my great grandmother, a ghost in a brittle photograph, dressed in Spanish lacefanning herself in a room full of mahogany and sepia roses still breathing whispers of family secrets in a time I will never hear.Would you believe they loved each other, ifI told you what they saw in each other’s eyesevery morning? Was it the war or love or boththat urged them across the sea on a journeythat may have also begun with tears and endedin a harbor wreathed with palms and cane fieldsquietly turning the Cuban sun into sugar.What if they had gone to Johannesburg or Rio instead, or never left Sevilla at all? What would be my grandfather’s name, how tallwould my father be? What would be the colorof my eyes, and how differently would I seethe story I want you to believe—the story I want to believe myself—that I have willedevery detail of this life I am living, and notthat I’m more like a winged seed or a drop of raindriven by the past and falling by chance hereand not there, wherever there may have been:What other seas would I’ve cast thoughts,how many other cities would I’ve drowned in,what countries would I have lost or betrayed,what languages would I speak or not speak, how many other names would be my name, what would I not remember or never be told,of the story I’d like to tell, but cannot tell you.

A Thoroughly Incomplete Autobiography

rIchard blaNco was made in Cuba, assembled in Spain, and imported to the US—meaning his mother, seven months pregnant, and the rest of the family arrived as exiles from Cuba to Madrid where he was born. The family emigrated once more and settled in Miami.

His first book, City of a Hundred Fires, received the Agnes Starrett Poetry Prize (1998). Directions to The Beach of the Dead (University of Arizona Press, 2005) won the 2006 PEN / American Beyond Margins Award. Blanco’s poems have appeared in Ploughs hares, TriQuarterly, Michigan Quarterly, National Public Radio, and more. A former Assistant Professor, has taught at Georgetown, American University, and Connecticut State University. Currently, he is a board member and Vice-President of The Macondo Foundation.

p o e T r y : r I c h a r d b l a N c o

there should be nothing here i don’t remember

The Gulf Motel with the mermaid lamppostsand ships’ wheels in the lobby should still be rising out of the sand like a cake decoration.My brother and I should still be pretending we don’t know our parents, embarrassing us as they roll the luggage cart past the front deskpiled with our scuffed suitcases, two-dozenloaves of Cuban bread, brown bags bulgingwith enough mangos to last the entire week, a scoured pressure cooker, our espresso pot, and a pork roast, the car still reeking of garlic.All because we can’t afford to eat out, not evenon a vacation only two hours from our homein Miami, but far enough away to be thrilled by the whiter sands on the west side of Florida, where for the first time I should still be watchingthe sun setting, instead of rising, over the ocean.


My mother should still be in the kitchenette of the Gulf Motel, her daisy sandals from K-Martsqueaking over the linoleum tiles; she should still begorgeous in her teal swimsuit and amber earringsstirring a pot of arroz-con-pollo, adding sprinklesof onion powder and dollops of tomato sauce.My father should still be in a terrycloth jacketsmoking and clinking a glass of amber whiskyin the sunset at the Gulf Motel, watching usdive into the pool, the two boys he’ll never see grow up into men that will be proud of him.


My brother and I should still be playing Parcheesiand my father should still be alive, slow dancingwith my mother on the sliding-glass balconyof the Gulf Motel. No music, only the waveskeeping time, a song only their minds can hearten-thousand nights back to their life in Cuba. My mother’s face should still be resting againsthis bare chest like the moon resting on the sea, the stars should still be turning around them.


My brother should still be thirteen, sneakingrum in the bathroom, sculpting naked womenin the sand. I should still be eight years old,still dazzled by seashells, by how many secondsI can hold my breath underwater. But I’m not, I am thirty-eight, driving down Collier Avenue, looking for the Gulf Motel, for everythingthat should still be, but isn’t. I want to blamethe condos, their shadows for ruining the beach and my past, I want to chase the snowbirds away with their tacky McMansions and yachts, I wantto turn the golf courses back into mangroves,I want to find the Gulf Motel exactly as it was,pretend, for a moment, nothing I’ve lost is lost.

Looking for The Gulf Motel, Marco Island, Florida


…

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