My Work

Poems:

 
Many years ago, the Buffalo News published my first poem, "Departure." I went to the corner store to buy my paper, told everyone there, "Look! My poem!" When I went to pay, the clerk refused my money, and the sound of applause filled tiny Wilson Farms. 

Here are some of my poems: 

Departure Ahoy the Indies Second Home Aller's Farm Iowa	Crossing Brooklyn Bridge Mongo Santamaría... Shadow on Stone Mama Angélica

Other links for My Work:

Memoir

Other Writings

Departure

Three cardboard suitcases - the only ones left in a city everyone was leaving - lined up like shortcomings. I looked away cut, somehow. Papa started the Ford; Juana came out in her red and white pinstriped uniform I embraced her and never looked back. I call Havana streets by name as we drove on, the morning washing them down making them blue and clean and still so early. Soon the heat will be rising like a ghost. Grandmother's iron gate, the porch, the empty rocking chairs, her flower beds, the geometric pattern of the garden tiles. She is ready. We drive to the harbor.

The ship is bigger than the sea. All doors in the city open, all windows open, all hands pull at my blue suit. Nothing to declare. Passengers aboard. Mama, Papa, Mama Angelica: from the railing I see you behind years of glass. I hear your silence rushing through my ears. How small you grow, cardboard family, cut-out figures, each with a hand held high as the ship begins to move. At the mouth of the bay I see your handkerchiefs, frail. I see you break. I am afraid to look back and see myself next to you waving inconsolable.

Ahoy the Indies

I retrace my steps, the long walks on the streets of Barcelona past herbalists' shops in the dark Gothic Quarter, past caged canaries singing from ancient walls. I am a wanderer pacing the surface of a madre patria I cannot recognize. Columbus towers over the harbor. His index finger points at the Indies, at my grandmother left behind in Cuba on her empty porch.

He points at the red hibiscus, petals on fire, tells her again: "This is the most beautiful land human eyes have ever seen." She looks at the white garden wall. She sees my shadow dressed in taffeta, her great-grandchildren in New York snow living out the last leg of the Admiral's voyage.

Second Home

Spring after spring just a few miles east of Buffalo, New York, Canada geese return to stubbled fields of wintered corn. Their sloppy landing on wet furrows patched with unmelted snow, their calls announcing paradise regained awaken a longing for my faded Havana streets. This April my friend Mary

saddled the bay and the dappled mare, and we rode out into fields of stubble and wintered corn, disturbed a flock of geese who took flight over our heads, and our horses shied. We broke into gallop and laughter, yelled our war cries, full speed the horses, each stride drumming the word Home, home perhaps, perhaps home at last.

Aller's Farm, Iowa

Longing for the island of Cuba wears thin here in Iowa where cornfields are real and there's a hickory tree with a rope swing you can sit on and fly over barns and silos that look like pictures on a glossy calendar. Crossing Huck Finn's river late last night I was a boy on a raft. Silver possum crossed Route 64 in a silver possum dream, and insects cracked like eggs against my windshield. Now I have crossed the Mississippi how pale the other rivers I carry in my head like a snail its home.

Names memorized in a fifth grade class:Cabrera, Yariguá Chaparra, Mayarí Moa, Toa Duaba, Miel Rivers blurred like the photographs of my dead family holding squirming dogs in their arms, riding small horses, smoking, laughing as if their world would never end. Here at Aller's farm just east of Cedar Rapids I can see radiant asparagus beds and touch the tips of the green fingers that point to heaven. There is music to the names here:   Tiffin Lone Tree Oskalooksa Coon Rapids Little Turkey

Crossing Brooklyn Bridge

Mongo Santamaría
Calling the Spirits from Buffalo

Mongo’s hands are flying on the drum, opening a path of air for their bare black feet and polished soles. His voice is calling for Obatalá, king of spirits, ruler of the white parts of the body, for Osaín, the great healer, who smokes cigars and sometimes lives inside a turtle shell, for Changó, who gallops his horse across the sky and loves corn meal and red wine. Mongo is calling Ochún, queen of sweetness, drinker of chamomile tea with honey, the goddess no one has ever seen cry. He is opening a path for Yemayá, black as coal, mother of the world, immense and pure as the sea, holding her fan of peacock feathers.

And here they are now with their brilliant bead necklaces, cowrie shells, and pieces of divining coconut, without coats or shoes among the high snows of Buffalo.

Shadow on Stone
On an Anniversary of Hiroshima

On the granite steps the shadow of the person sitting there that morning in Hiroshima. And on the day I left Cuba, my friends died. Raúl died in his blue sailboat. Alvaro died as he brought his violin to his chin and began to read the first notes on the yellowed page. Elvira died knocking at the door of a safe house. Evelio died dancing without me.

Sometimes after twenty-five years: a voice on the telephone, or a letter under the door, or a tape of Alvaro playing Brahms. The applause goes through me like a gunshot. In a secret place in this house, in the dark, shadow and shadow and shadow, I gather us together into the first small seed.

MAMA ANGÉLICA
To my grandmother

Dressed in widow’s black, the top of your feet rising like tiny bread loaves from your diminutive black shoes, you push open the San Rafael Street door and we walk into Havana’s Woolworth’s --el ten-cen, we call it.   For days, I’d waited for my hand in yours, so that we could begin our journey through school supplies: gold stars in cardboard boxes, construction paper stacked like rainbow slices, rubber bands delicately bunched, cases of Prismacolor pencils.   We move on. Up the escalator to pets: A bell for my parakeet, a deep-sea diver for my fish tank.

You open your black change purse, and a centavo a goes into the scale. ‘ Here’s my fortune: You will travel. Tired Mama Angélica, tired abuela, at the soda fountain now, dipping her paper napkin into the ice water when no one is looking, wiping her slender fingers clean. Then she’s lost in the mirrors lining the counter wall, practicing leaving us, tasting death in small portions, now and then feeling for our packages under the counter, making sure no one has taken anything away.