They have never seen
the dancing plants
of Cuba.
WHEN I WAS A WILD HORSE
The next time I draw a picture,
it’s the same gold-winged
rumba dancer, but this time
she’s on horseback, smiling,
and somehow I know
that I am both
the flying rider
and the swift
steed.
After that, whenever adults
ask me if I plan to be an artist
like my father, I answer:
No, I will be
a wild horse
above green hills,
flying. . . .
MI MAMI CUBANA
On the streets of Los Angeles,
strangers ask me if my mother
is a movie star.
Her beauty makes men
turn their heads, while envious women
advise her to wear a crimson hibiscus
behind one ear, just like all the other
exotic foreign stars.
But Mami is shy.
She would rather tend a whole garden
than wear a single boastful blossom
in her dark, wavy hair.
Homesick, she listens to Cuban music.
Homesick, she sings to herself in Spanish.
Homesick, she tells stories about the island.
Homesick, she sews flowery tropical
mother-daughter dresses,
even though Mad and I prefer
to run around outdoors wearing shorts,
and never matching
at all.
When Mami gives us pretty dolls,
we toss them into a closet.
Instead, we play with insects, snails,
and earthworms.
But Mami expects us to iron bedsheets,
and set the table, while all I want to do
is read tales of adventure.
As I read The Black Stallion, White Fang,
and The Call of the Wild,
I notice that the heroes are always boys.
Luckily, Mami assures me
that I can do anything a boy can do.
She lets me and Mad fill our room
with living creatures.
Caterpillars, tadpoles, lizards,
stray cats and dogs, a rabbit,
and wild, wounded birds.
Mami understands us after all.
Somehow, she knows that even girls
who have to cook, clean, sew, and iron
also need the freedom to heal
injured wings.
DAMAGED AIR
Los Angeles is smoggy.
We have to burn our trash
in a backyard incinerator.
No wonder the air feels cursed
by smoke.
No wonder Mami is still homesick
for blue sky
cleaned
by tropical storms.
One by one,
she tries a dozen arts:
developing photos in a darkroom,
spinning soft clay on a potter’s wheel,
shaping hard metal into jewelry. . . .
One by one,
she masters more and more
English words, and conquers more
and more of her fears, even learning
how to drive a car, although she never
dares to try the speedy freeway.
Slowly, on side streets,
she takes us to parks with streams,
where we gather wild watercress
for bitter salads.
Still homesick, Mami finally enters
the starstruck dreams of Hollywood,
but she does not act.
No, the only role she plays is real,
her true feelings on display
as entertainment
for strangers.
The name of the ugly program
is Queen for a Day, a game show
where competing women cry and plead,
until one of them receives
a gold crown,
and a wish.
On TV, Mami weeps, begging
for an airplane ticket
to visit her mother
in Cuba.
But she loses.
Instead, the audience chooses
another crying woman, a blonde
who only wants a washer-dryer,
a familiar wish,
American-made,
and modern.
Metallic. Hard. Cold.
Solid.
KINSHIP
Two sets
of family stories,
one long and detailed,
about many centuries
of island ancestors, all living
on the same tropical farm . . .
The other side of the family tells stories
that are brief and vague, about violence
in the Ukraine, which Dad’s parents
had to flee forever, leaving all their
loved ones
behind.
They don’t even know if anyone
survived.
When Mami tells her flowery tales of Cuba,
she fills the twining words with relatives.
But when I ask my
Ukrainian-Jewish-American grandma
about her childhood in a village
near snowy Kiev,
all she reveals is a single
memory
of ice-skating
on a frozen pond.
Apparently, the length
of a grown-up’s
growing-up story
is determined
by the difference
between immigration
and escape.
THE GEOGRAPHY OF LIBRARIES
Spoken stories are no longer enough
to fill my hunger.
I crave a constant supply
of written ones, too.
Each week, I check out
as many library books as I can carry,
so many that I feel like a juggler,
balancing
stacks
of entrancing
pages
in midair.
When I’ve finished reading
every book in the children’s section,
I begin sneaking into the library’s
grown-up zone, where travel books
help me dream
of islands.
OTHER JOURNEYS
Some summers,
we manage to travel,
even though Dad
has to borrow money
for visits to Cuba,
where Mami can finally see
her family, and I can feel
at home with my second self,
the invisible twin who belongs
to this wild tropical farm
instead of a modern
city.
DIFFERENT
During the school year,
there is only one of me,
a misfit bookworm
with long braids,
worried eyes,
a broken tooth
that makes me look
like a vampire,
and report cards
that I have to hide,
so I won’t be
insulted
and teased.
When teachers complain that I’m bored,
they make me skip a couple of grades,
so now, overnight, I’m suddenly
so much younger
than everyone else
in a class
where I know
no one.
Now there is only one place where I can
truly belong, this endless stack
of blank pages in my mind,
an empty world
where I scribble
more and more poems,
while I walk back a
nd forth
to my city school,
wishing
for farm life,
and a self that feels
natural.
HORSE CRAZY
Dad and Mami say that what I want
doesn’t make sense—not when we live
in a busy city like Los Angeles.
They insist that I can only take art classes
and ballet, not horseback riding.
But I’ve read enough travel adventures
to know that, sometimes, common sense
is not something truly
worth making.
So I ride in my daydreams.
I gallop.
I fly!
EARTHBOUND
Certain summers have only huge,
flightless wings, like ostriches
or emus.
This year, my parents decide
that all we can afford is a road trip,
a long, exotic drive through hot deserts
to Mexico, where Mad and I climb
the Pyramid of the Sun
and the Pyramid of the Moon.
In tropical jungles, wild green parrots
remind me of island skies, and in villages,
I meet the pleading gazes of legless beggars
who endlessly chant una caridad
por el amor de Dios.
Charity, for the love of God.
Kindness.
MYSTERIES
One after another, afterlife visions
astound me.
At a village funeral,
there are festive fireworks,
and all the mourners wear white
instead of black.
Underground, in the eerie catacombs
of Guanajuato, I flee from las momias,
the mummies that aren’t really mummies
at all, just grinning skeletons,
posed in agonized positions
that come back
in nightmares
to haunt me.
Later, along the green banks
of a quiet river in Oaxaca,
Mad and I make friends
with a boy named Pancho,
who rides his own burro,
a donkey that makes me
so envious, I can’t believe
that Pancho envies me.
He thinks my city life
with cars and bicycles
must be so much more
exciting
than his donkey.
Is there any way that two people
from faraway places
can ever really
understand each other’s
daydreams?
RUNAWAY HORSES
The only souvenir I want in Mexico
is a palm-leaf raincoat like Pancho’s.
The dry, brown leaves feel scratchy,
but when tropical rain pours down,
I know how it feels to be a tree
that belongs to nature.
After Dad paints the stone ruins
of Monte Albán, we drive to the dreamlike
shores of Lake Pátzcuaro, in Michoacán,
where the wide nets of fishermen are shaped
like graceful
butterfly wings.
Soon, in a village on the rugged slopes
of Volcán Paricutín, we rent horses,
so we can ride up the volcano to see
a church steeple
that survived the flow
of fiery lava.
The volcano is hard and dark,
a stark landscape that makes my horse
shudder, but the sunlit church steeple
looks like something dreamed
by Don Quixote.
My frightened horse
runs away with me,
galloping
back downhill.
By the time we reach the village,
my hands are sore from clinging,
but I haven’t fallen off, so I feel
as if I have absorbed
a new power,
the invisible
shadow
of courage.
HOMECOMING
By the time we cross the dusty
US border, we’ve spent every
centavo of borrowed travel money,
and all we have to eat
is bread with goat milk caramel,
and all I ever plan to wear
is my palm-leaf raincoat,
even though the dry fronds
are already
starting
to crumble.
NEWS
At home, I begin to suspect
that the expense of airplane tickets
was not my parents’ only reason
for wandering around Mexico
all summer, earthbound,
instead of flying
through the enchanted air
to Cuba.
Revolution.
Violence.
Gunfire.
Danger.
Our old black-and-white TV flickers,
as if it has a conscience
and is reluctant
to keep showing
one horror after another.
People in Cuba are fighting.
It’s a civil war to overthrow
a dictator.
Are some of Mami’s many cousins
killing
others?
I wish the TV would turn
into a book with obedient pages
that could be flipped quickly
to reach the next
story.
WHAT AM I?
At school, all the teachers and students
seem angered by Cuba.
WHAT ARE YOU?
they ask.
It’s a question that requires fractions,
and I don’t like math.
Do I have to admit
that I’m half Cuban and half American,
or should I go even further, and explain
that Dad’s parents were born in the Ukraine,
part of Soviet Russia?
Or am I just entirely American,
all the fractions left behind
WE WERE LIKE SANTA CLAUS
ON THAT POOR LITTLE ISLAND,
my teacher vows.
She kneels down and speaks directly
into my ear, as if confiding a terrible secret.
SUCH INGRATITUDE, she adds.
Clearly, it’s an accusation.
Even though I don’t understand,
somehow I end up
feeling guilty.
Why should such an ignorant grown-up
imagine
that she knows me?
MORE AND MORE SECRETS
My gentle parents, who never yell,
now spend more and more time
whispering.
I hear the sound
through solid walls.
It seems even louder
than shouting.
Even louder
than the TV news
with its conscience,
all that flickering.
SPIES
Our Skunk Hollow neighborhood
is usually friendly.
Mami knows the names of the mailman,
milkman, breadman, brushman,
knife sharpener, and Avon lady.
Mami is polite to
every door-to-door salesman,
even the ones who toss dirt
onto our floor, so they can demonstrate
vacuum cleaners.
But sometimes, friendly neighbors
become nosy.
An old woman who peeks out
from behind her curtains
loves to tell on me
if I ride my bike too fast,
or don’t look both ways
before crossing the street.
When I make fr
iends with a girl
who likes to play on the edge
of the dangerous freeway,
someone tattles, and soon
I’m in trouble.
Our neighborhood
can sometimes
turn unfriendly.
Are people staring
from behind ruffled curtains
because I’m so disobedient,
or because they know that Mami
is from Cuba?
INVESTIGATED
One day, Mami receives a phone call
that makes her look terrified.
She calls Dad and begs him to rush home.
A few minutes later, two men in suits
knock on our door.
Luckily, Dad is home by the time Mami
has to face two grim agents
from the Federal Bureau
of Investigation.
FBI.
Just like on TV.
Only somehow, now
we are suddenly
the bad guys.
What’s wrong with receiving
phone calls, letters, and packages
from Cuba?
Are we supposed to care less
about Mami’s family on the island
than Dad’s family—my grandma
and grandpa, aunts, uncles,
and cousins
who live so close
that we see them
every Sunday?
Can one half of my family
really be so much worse
than the other?
If only I could just be myself,
instead of half puzzle
and half riddle.
AFTER THE FBI
All the magic
escapes
from the air
in our cozy home,
as if a floating balloon
has popped, leaving nothing
but a lifeless flap
of colored
plastic.
MY OWN QUESTIONS
If only I could be the one
investigating.
I would ask why the men in suits
insisted that they already have a file
for Dad, a file that could put his name
on a dreaded blacklist, so that no
museum or art gallery
will ever exhibit
his paintings.
The agents said they knew that Dad
took an art-history correspondence class
from a Communist UCLA professor
during World War II.
The agents didn’t care
that when he took the class,
Dad was a sailor on an unarmed
merchant marine boat, bravely
carrying food for hungry sailors
on US Navy warships.