With love for Curtis, who travels with me, and with hope for all the young wildlife conservation superheroes of the future
Cada persona es un mundo.
“Each person is a world.”
—Cuban folk saying
SUMMER 2015
A time of change
Family Disaster
EDVER
Miami, Florida, USA
I thought I was prepared
for any emergency. Fires, floods,
hurricanes, rogue gunmen, bombs,
and worse—we’ve covered them all,
in scary student emergency training drills.
We’ve shut down the school,
painted our faces with fake blood,
and practiced carrying one another
to an imaginary helicopter, moaning
and screaming with almost-real fear
as we pretended to survive crazy
catastrophes.
Nowhere in all that madness
did I ever imagine being sent away
by Mom, to meet my long-lost dad
in the remote forest where I was born
on an island no one in Miami
ever mentions without sighs,
smiles, curses, or tears . . .
but travel laws have suddenly changed,
the Cold War is over, and now it’s a lot easier
for divided half-island, half-mainland
Cuban American families
to be reunited.
Mom is so weirdly thrilled,
it seems suspicious.
From the moment she announced
that she was sending me away to meet Dad,
I could tell how relieved she felt to be getting
a relaxing break from her wild child,
the troublemaker—me.
If she would listen, I would argue
that it’s not my fault a racing bicycle
got in my way while I was playing a game
on my phone and skateboarding at the same time.
That’s what games are for—entertainment, right?
Escape, so that all those minutes spent gliding
home from school aren’t so shameful.
As long as I stare into a private screen,
no one who sees me
knows
I’m alone.
Tap, zap, swipe,
the phone makes me look as busy
as someone with plenty of friends,
a kid who’s good at sports
instead of science.
In that way, I’m just like Mom, who hardly ever
looks up from her laptop on weekends.
She just keeps working like a maniac,
trying to rediscover lost species.
She’s a cryptozoologist, a scientist who searches
for hidden creatures, both the legendary ones
like Bigfoot, and others that no one ever sees
anymore, simply because they’re so rare
and shy, hiding while terrorized by hunters,
loggers, and poachers who sell their stuffed
or pinned parts to collectors.
Yuck.
But what if there’s more?
What if Mom’s real reason for peering
into her secret online world
is flirting to meet weird guys
who might not even be
the handsome heroes
shown in their photos . . . ?
What if she’s dating,
and that’s why she needs
to get rid of me, so she can go out
with creeps
while I’m away?
Our Fluttering Lives
LUZA
La Selva, Cuba
Green
all around me,
blue
up above,
and now my little brother
is finally on his way
to visit!
I’ve heard about Edver all my life,
from Abuelo, who misses his daughter—my mamá—
and from Papi, who speaks so mournfully of a time
when we all lived together as a family, rooted
in our forest, and winged
with shared dreams.
Now, as I step down to a clay bank where clouds
of blue butterflies have landed, brightness pulses
as the radiant insects sip dark minerals from mud,
performing a dance of hunger
called puddling.
Las mariposas—the butterflies—remind me
of miniature angels, skyborne, glowing,
magical and natural at the same time.
Do they know how fragile and brief
their airborne lives
will be?
at the airport, maybe I’ll come back to this mossy
riverbank and sculpt a vision of people
with upside-down wings
beneath leafy green trees
rooted in sky. . . .
Or even better, I could just stand here and wait
for a tiny colibrí to arrive, a hummingbird no bigger
than a bee, the world’s smallest bird, one of the many
living treasures that make Papi such a great
wildlife superhero, protecting our forest’s
rare creatures
from the hunger
and greed
of poachers.
Saying Good-Bye to My Real Life
EDVER
On the last day of school before summer vacation,
I move like a shadow, trying to hide from all the kids
who saw that video of me crashing my skateboard
into the racing bike.
If I ever learn how to code my own truly cool game,
I’ll fill it with shadow people whose feelings
can’t be
seen.
Tomorrow I’ll fly to Cuba.
Maybe getting away is a good thing.
If I stayed home, all I would do
is hide in my room
and play games
alone.
Raro
LUZA
¡Qué raro! How strange!
Yes, it feels truly surrealistic
to set out traveling like this,
happily ready to meet a stranger
and call him
my brother.
I hope he feels the same way about me.
Rare.
Like a forest bird
in the city.
The Isolation of Islands
EDVER
The plane lands.
A flight attendant leads me to a line.
Questions.
Answers.
Another fidgety wait.
More questions.
I show my passport.
My backpack is inspected.
The dissecting microscope
is passed around by men and women
in uniforms, some blue, others green,
until eventually everything
is returned to me
instead of stolen.
I sigh with relief,
but by now I’m so nervous that all I want to do
is calm my mind with the soothing clicks, zaps,
and whooshes of electronic dragon flames
in my favorite game, an online world
filled with griffin slobber,
troll breath, and the oozing farts
of lumbering ogres.
Imaginary animals are almost as bizarre
as the real ones, like that iridescent green
jewel cockroach wasp
I wrote about
for a nonfiction
book report.
The wasp injects poison into a roach’s brain,
turning the bigger insect into a zombie
that can be ridden like a horse,
using the antennae as reins,
until they reach the wasp’s nest,
where guess what, the obedient roach
is slowly, grossly
eaten by squirming
larvae.
No beeps or ringtones now.
No web of games and calming clicks.
No Internet at all, for researching
hideously fascinating natural stuff.
Being phoneless is my punishment
for that stupid bicyclist’s injuries,
but Mom says I wouldn’t be able to find
cell phone signals in Dad’s forest anyway,
and hardly anyone on this entire island
has ever been on the Internet.
So I might as well be visiting the distant past
instead of a geographic curiosity, this antique place
where I was born.
All around me, Havana’s José Martí Airport
bustles with joyful, abruptly reunited families,
all the shrieks,
sobs, and hugs
of long-lost relatives
as they find one another
for the first time in ten, twenty,
or fifty years.
I miss my phone.
How can such a loud island
be as electronically silent
as prehistory?
LUZA
Papi is so dedicated to patrolling our forest
that he won’t leave for even one day.
That’s why the villagers call him el Lobo—the Wolf.
He never gives up when he’s tracking a poacher
who wants to eat a rare parrot, or steal
a bee-sized hummingbird
and sell it
as a pet.
So Abuelo and I are the only ones
who make the long trip to meet my brother
at the airport.
Fortunately, my grandpa knows how to find rides
the whole way, as we bump and rattle along potholed roads
in old cars already crowded with other hitchhikers,
all of us weary after an ordeal of waiting, sweating,
and praying
beneath the blazing sun.
This is verano, summer, the rainy season,
but for some unknown reason, we’re in the middle
of our island’s worst drought.
Is it climate change, the disaster Papi
keeps talking about?
Rivers of clouds
above rivers of water
have suddenly dried up,
leaving tropical parts
of the world
uncertain.
To pass the time, I imagine a future
of cave-dwelling, toolmaking rats
that will someday rule everything
unless deforestation
is stopped.
What a dilemma, Abuelo points out—we need
transportation, but we also want limitations.
We need farmland, but we can’t chop down
all the wild, natural treasure of trees.
Drought in the rainy season is this year’s curse.
Last year we had too many foreign tourists
stealing plants from our forest to use
as medicines, or to plant the prettiest orchids
in greenhouses, or simply because people
are greedy, and Papi can’t patrol
every trail
all the time.
Even a wolf
needs a pack,
a team.
If only Mamá had never left.
Together, the two of them
could have been
fierce.
Bigfoot and Other Possibilities
EDVER
If Mom weren’t a cryptozoologist,
I probably wouldn’t be a science nerd.
Maybe I would have more friends,
play on a team, get invited to parties,
and hang out at skate parks,
instead of crashing into bicyclists.
Mom travels the world looking for animals
that might not exist, and others that were firmly
believed to be extinct, until they were suddenly
rediscovered, becoming Lazarus species,
like that dead guy in the Bible
who was brought back to life—a miracle,
only these rare creatures have been found
by the hard work of stubborn scientists
who keep on and on, searching.
The Vu Quang ox, for instance.
It’s a unicorn look-alike
in Vietnam and Laos.
It was classified as gone, then rediscovered,
and now it’s endangered again, because the forest
where it lives
is shrinking.
So I guess if Mom ever finds Bigfoot or the yeti
or the Loch Ness monster, she’ll have to list them
as threatened.
She says there are only two possible
twenty-first-century attitudes
toward nature:
1. Use it before you lose it.
2. Protect it while you can.
In an effort to make me love the father
I don’t remember, she tells me he’s a superhero,
the perfect example of a wildlife protector,
sacrificing everything to guard a single
mountaintop, along with all the bugs,
birds, bats, snakes, and lizards
that live there.
When she talks about him, her voice
slowly grows a little bit amazed, as if he’s
a hidden fossil washed to the surface
by flash floods.
I wish she would talk about me that way
instead of urging me to go play outdoors
like a kid half my age.
She says it doesn’t make sense,
the way I love science but don’t know
how to explore.
Mom doesn’t make sense either,
like right before the Miami airport
when she told me I’d soon meet
someone special—a surprise,
but she said it isn’t Dad,
and she just got quiet
after I demanded
details.
I’ve never been a fan of Mom’s
spontaneous surprises.
They’re usually embarrassing,
upsetting, or worse,
like that time when she made me
change schools without warning,
or the Christmas when cousins
from far away tried to visit
and she refused to open the door,
insisting that she needed
to work.
What will it be this time?
I don’t even want to make myself
dizzy and miserable
trying to guess.
Fragmentology
LUZA
When poor people hitchhike,
each ride is a gathering of attitudes.
Some whine about hunger.
Others share fruit.
Many sing; others remain silent
or tell wild stories, making up
fantastic lies.
Abuelo just speaks quietly, privately,
trying to prepare me for meeting my brother.
Why did the mother I can barely remember
choose Edver to go north with her,
while leaving me so far
behind?
Two fragments, two children, divided up
like leftovers
after a big picnic.
It happens all the time in Cuba,
families breaking up
into tiny remnants, like feathers
carried by wind
long after the bird
has died.
If I’m going to be a broken wing,
let me flutter at least once
before the magic
is lost.
Face-to-Face
EDVER
Beyond the airport’s noisy baggage carousel,
a skinny old man holds up a sign with VERDE,
my real name, the word that didn’t change
until kindergarten in Miami, when everyone
made fun of me for being called Green.
So I reversed it, only I couldn’t pronounce
Edrev, so it turned into Edver.
Now, as if he knows the real me—a nerdy kid
named for the color of forest trees—Abuelo hugs me
fiercely, then grabs my backpack, chattering
rapidly, Cuban-style, as he leads me out to a blaze
of melting asphalt, where colorfully painted
antique cars are lined up all over the parking lot
in gleaming rows, like life-sized toys
for grown-ups.
Tu hermana, Abuelo says,
shoving me into the arms of a girl
so close to my age
that we could be twins.
¿Hermana?
Sister?
As far as I know,
I’ve always been
an only child!
Trying to pretend that I know
what’s going on, I sort of hug her,
then bob my head like a bouncing ball,
barely listening
to her questions.
All I can do is think—really, Mom?
So this was your big surprise?
So many lectures about how to behave
on this island, but my mother never even bothered
to mention that I have una hermana, a sister,
my sibling, a mystery, puzzle, riddle. . . .
¿Por qué? Why? Don’t I deserve simple truth
instead of complicated, loca-crazy
genius-Mom
selfishness?
There’s only one way to survive
this sudden sister shock—pretend
I don’t
care.
Rediscovered
LUZA
I can’t believe she never told him.
I’ve known about Edver all my life!
The ride to our tía’s house
in a rattling old taxi
now feels like a journey
across warped time
and empty space,
light-years of confusion
condensed into just a few
harsh minutes.
This whole city of La Habana is crumbling,