Contents
Epigraph
Earthbound
Wide Air
Wild Air
Drifting
Green Earth
Enchanted Earth
Acknowledgments
About the Author
for dreamers whose dreams seem impossible
¡Volar sin alas donde todo es cielo!
Anota este jocundo
pensamiento: Parar, parar el mundo
entre las puntas de los pies,
y luego darle cuerda del revés
para verlo girar en el vacío . . .
To fly without wings where all is sky!
Note this cheerful
thought: To stop, to stop the world
between the tips of your feet,
and then spin it in reverse
to watch it twirl through space . . .
—Antonio Machado, “Poema 53”
EARTHBOUND
Summer visits to the enchanted air of Trinidad de Cuba are
illegal now, transforming my mother’s hometown into
a mystery of impossibility, no longer reachable
in real life.
My roaming dreams can only ramble through the library,
dancing on flat, shiny pages, across all the countries of
National Geographic magazine, choosing villages
with brilliant sunlight, bright parrots, green jungles,
tropical heat.
I’ve endured enough of being in between—too young for
solitary trips, but more than old enough for motionless
teenage
isolation.
Yes, I feel ready to grow up and seize the first job that promises
a nomadic life . . .
but before I can finish college and become independent,
I have to start
high school.
Wide Air
1966–1968
TRAVEL DREAMS
Destinations sweep over me
from colors in dazzling photos,
a warm, inviting quality seen only in the light
of tropical air.
I’ll save piles of babysitting money
and make my escape from Los Angeles.
No more smog, just a rain forest, peaceful
beneath sky so intense that each breath
must be enchanted like Cuba’s aire,
floating birdlike and wild above jungles
and farms, green between two
shades of blue,
sea and heaven,
half wave-washed memory,
half soaring daydream.
Where should I travel?
Peru, Borneo, India?
The brightness of photos is dimmed
only by my age, too young for solitary
journeys, too old for imaginary
horse-friends.
REALITY
India sounds perfect,
but my travel dreams
have to wait.
High school starts right after
my fourteenth birthday, the halls
a
whirlwind
of
strangers . . .
but I’m pretty good at starting over
because I have plenty of practice saying goodbye
to the past, so after school, I sit on a rigid wall
wishing for the future, waiting to be older,
my current age a hybrid
half riddle,
half puzzle.
THE GEOGRAPHY OF A WALL
The wall is a barrier that separates
John Marshall High School from the street,
a dry imitation of my seawall memory,
that coral stone Malecón in Havana.
This wall is designed to separate waves of
raucous students
from dangerous riptides
of traffic.
Or is it just meant to keep rich kids and regular ones
apart? The wealthy have cars that zoom away
while the rest of us wait for a bus or a parent,
the wall dividing cascades of us into tide pools,
settled groups of relaxed kids who met in kindergarten,
and seaweed-like strays, those of us who transferred
from out of the district, and arrived knowing
no one.
Cool kids.
Loners.
Stoners.
Will I ever wash ashore in a swirling
puddle
of friendship?
With my wide Cuban hips
and frizzy black hair,
I’ll never belong
with blond surfers
or elegant “socials,”
so I just have to hope
that sooner or later,
other drifting
bookworms
will find me.
ARMY M.
It doesn’t take too many weeks on the wall
for one of the short-haired, military ROTC boys
to start flirting with me.
I’m Cuban American.
He’s Mexican American.
Close enough.
But his army hair worries me.
How long will it be until he ends up in Vietnam,
killing
dying
or both?
I belong to a family of pacifists, always marching
to protest, because the Cold War has already sliced
our familia in half, so just imagine how much worse
it must be in southeast Asia, where US bombs
and chemical napalm flames
burn villagers alive
on the news
every night.
DATING
No war can last forever, so sooner or later
M.’s army world and my peace dove wishes
will surely meet in the middle.
Won’t they?
Suddenly my plan to spend weekends babysitting
in order to save money for tropical expeditions
no longer seems as urgent as Friday nights
cruising around in a low-rider car,
my fourteen-year-old freshman mind
so imperfectly matched
with an almost-eighteen senior,
mi novio,
my boyfriend.
His older pals/carnales in the backseat
have already dropped out of school,
joined the army, fought in Vietnam,
and returned with tattoos
and all sorts of other
scars.
A WHIRLWIND OF MONTHS
Time
t
w
i
s
t
s
and
tangles,
spinning me
far away
from unrealistic
travel dreams.
Classwork.
Homework.
Research papers.
Friday nights cruising.
Saturday mornings at the Arroyo Seco Library
followed by babysitting jobs, my money stashed
and slowly growing toward some remote corner
of Bengal or Kashmir.
BOOKWORM
I can’t stop, even though M.’s friends
make fun of me for studying hard
and reading travel tales in my spare time,
the places they’ve seen on their way to the war
so mysterious and adventurous to me,
a too-young girl who understands nothing
about battles.
Peace freak.
Flower child.
Hippie.
Army M.’s friends say it’s e
asy to protest
against violence, when you’re not the one
who will get arrested if you don’t register
for the draft.
They’re right—in wartime, life
is so much shorter for boys, since girls
aren’t forced—or even allowed—to fight.
Bookworm. It’s the creature name I’ve been called
all my life, but in Cuba
gusano/worm means maggot,
an insult used by revolutionaries for chasing away
anyone who wants to join relatives
exiled in the US.
Abuelita, my grandma,
is probably being mocked as a gusana right now
along with all the others who dream of fleeing
their wave-cradled isle and reaching
this hard, rocky shore.
Bookworm.
There are so many ways of looking
at the winged future of a crawling caterpillar.
But I’m finally identified and claimed
by an eager group of studious readers
who are mostly mixed-together half this,
half that, tolerant of everyone else,
hyphenated Americans, all our hyphens
equally
winged.
Japan, Korea, China, Poland, Holland,
Mexico, Cuba, the homelands
of our immigrant parents
on the wall, where science
and poetry
are the passions
that unite us.
Some of my new friends have already
chosen career goals that require degrees
from the best Ivy League colleges,
so they load their after-school schedules
with extracurricular activities:
music, debate, theater, sports.
But the only club I would ever dare to hope for
is one made of girls who don’t belong anywhere,
so a state university will have to be good enough,
with fancy-school admission reserved for others
who are courageous enough
to perform
or compete.
DAYDREAMER
After those childhood summers in Cuba,
when my two-winged freedom to travel
was lost on both sides of the ocean,
I learned to imagine wholeness
by settling
into the weight
of motionless
earth.
But the world isn’t heavy, not really,
it flies
through the galaxy
orbiting around the sun, spinning
on an invisible axis and soaring far away
all at the same time, while floating people pretend
that we feel safely
rooted.
So that’s what I do, live two lives
awake and asleep, cruising or reading,
studying
dreaming . . .
I spend time with Army M.
and then my bookworm friends.
Night
and day.
I know how to balance
two spinning planets,
one in each hand,
like a juggler.
Don’t I?
SPANISH CLASS
This quieter Mexican rhythm is natural
in a city where everyone says mira—look
instead of Cuba’s oye—listen.
Perhaps this sense of language loss
is because our familia was so huge on the island
where relatives chattered, laughed, and shouted
at the same time, no one ever pausing
long enough to listen,
so that ¡oye!
was the only way
to get anyone’s
¡atención!
Now all those noisy, friendly cousins
might as well be living in another universe.
No travel, no summer visits, as if childhood
has been transformed into a fictional character’s
imaginary wish.
When a Chinese American bookworm friend
who plans to be a Spanish teacher someday
accuses me of rolling my rr
in an exaggerated way
that’s too long and trilling
like a cricket, I remember
how I was taught
by my cubana mother
who made me recite
over and over:
rr con rr guitarra
rr con rr barril
rápido corren
los carros
llevando las cañas
al ferrocarril.
Rr with rr guitar
rr with rr barrel
rapidly run the cars
carrying sugarcane
to the railroad.
Swiftly, with the rat-a-tat rhythm
of urgent island voices, that’s the way
Mami said rr should always
race.
But I’ve been away from Cuba for so long
that my faith in what I know begins to fade
and I end up silently resentful, instead of
defending my own real
memories.
Will I forget Spanish
if I fail to travel
and practice?
Chichen Itzá en México,
Machu Picchu en el Perú.
Tikal en Guatemala.
Which ancient ruins
of magnificent cities
should I plan to visit
first?
MORE WHIRLWINDS
Wherever my mind wanders, history follows,
spinning and twirling—Vietnam War, Cold War,
military offense, self-defense,
Communist or anticommunist
All these phrases I hear on the news every day
make me wonder why the US keeps trying to bully
this entire world, bombing countries
so far away.
My bookworm friends and I can’t stop
those fierce overseas battles, so instead we protest
our school’s dress code: let the boys grow long hair
and allow girls to wear jeans to class
instead of skirts.
We lose, of course, but at least we tried,
and the effort makes changing the spinning world’s
direction
seem possible.
In the meantime, guys drop out of school
just so they can grow ponytails.
All the long-haired boys run away
to San Francisco.
Los Angeles begins to feel like a land
of abandoned girls.
It takes me a while to figure out
that the boys with shaggy heads
are imitating rock stars—the musicians
who mimic bearded revolutionaries
like my uncles and cousins
on the island.
For such a small place,
Cuba seems to have a way
of gripping the whole world’s
atención.
TIME TRAVEL
At night, my mind spins
through flying dreams
as I rise and soar
superhero-style
arms reaching
forward
seeking
peace.
In dreams, I reject reality
and return to the blue-green-blue
isle of ocean-surrounded childhood,
a sliver of memory
treasured.
My only limitation is time.
Sooner or later, I’ll have to wake up
and return to my motionless teenage self.
When I was younger, I imagined an invisible twin
left behind on the island, and now I wonder, was she
a dream, or
is this sleeping self the real me?
IDENTITY
Even though I can’t feel
like a real cubanita anymore,
I still fill my room with colors from the tropics,
a red piñata and a female canary, caged and songless
just like me.
In English class, I write a short story about Abuelita,
who was bold enough to be the first divorced woman
in Trinidad de Cuba, our town on the belly
of the long-lost, crocodile-shaped island.
My grandfather had epilepsy at a time when morphine
was the only cure. He tried Cantonese herbs,
Congolese Santería, and indigenous curanderismo,
but he ended up growing violent, and eventually
he died of an overdose.
The priest blamed divorce.
No wonder Mom still resents the Catholic Church.
She limits her faith to reading Quaker newsletters
that help weave the peace movement
deeply and firmly
inside my mind.
Dad says he’s agnostic and also Jewish,
but he listens to a Hindu guru on the radio,
and when we go for a Sunday drive, he sits
beside a mountain stream and explains
that he’s trying to communicate with nature
as he brushes swirls of watercolor
across a sheet of blank paper
that turns out to be
a magical sort of mirror
that can show peaceful trees
exactly the way they are
while leaving out man-made
roads and fences, returning
a patch of wounded forest
to its natural
wholeness.
Someday, maybe my poetry and stories
will learn how to alter language, creating
a timescape where past and future
can meet.
NOT LIKE ROMEO AND JULIET
When Army M. turns eighteen
I help his huge family throw a lively party
even though his tattooed buddies
make fun of me for wearing bell-bottom
hippie pants
instead of a shimmery
ruffled dress.
Army M. and I don’t really break up.
He just leaves, and when he reaches
basic training, he sends me a photo
of his locker, with my school picture
taped up inside, smiling and wearing
sunflower yellow, a color that makes me look
like a stranger, because lately all I ever crave
is blue-green tie-dyed cloth, like Joan Baez,
the beautiful Mexican American Quaker,