Martín Espada

I close my eyes and see him windmilling his arms as he plummets from the Mystic Tobin Bridge, to prove me wrong, to show me he was good, to atone for sins like seeds in the lopsided apple of his heart, but mostly to escape from me in the back of his cab, a Puerto Rican lawyer in a suit and tie. I hated the 111 bus, sweltering in my suit and tie with the crowd in the aisle, waiting to hit a bump on the Mystic Tobin Bridge so my head would finally burst through the ceiling like a giraffe on a circus train. I hated the 111 bus after eviction day in Chelsea District Court, translating the landlords and judges into Spanish so the tenants knew they had to stuff their clothing into garbage bags and steal away again, away from the 40-watt squint that followed them everywhere, that followed me because I stood beside them in court. I would daydream in the humidity of the bus, a basketball hero, flipping the balled-up pages of the law into the wastebasket at the office as the legal aid lawyers chanted my name. I hated the 111 bus. I had to take a taxicab that day. What the hell you doing here? said the driver of the cab to me in my suit and tie.You gotta be careful in this neighborhood. There’s a lotta Josés around here. The driver’s great-grandfather staggered off a boat so his great-grandson could one day drive me across the Mystic Tobin Bridge, but there was no room in the taxi for chalk and a blackboard. He could hear the sawing of my breath as I leaned into his ear, past the bulletproof barricade somehow missing, and said:I’m a José. I could see the 40-watt squint in his rearview mirror.I’m Puerto Rican, I said. It was exactly 5 pm , and we were stuck in traffic in a taxi on the Mystic Tobin Bridge. The driver stammered his own West Side Story without the ballet, how a Puerto Rican gang stole his cousin’s wallet years ago.You think I’m gonna rob you?

—Washington, D.C. JC was called the Rack at the work farm, aluminum milk pails dangling from his hands. Once a sudden fist crushed the cartilage of nose across his face, but JC only grinned, and the man with the fist stumbled away. JC sings his work farm songs on the street, swaying with black overcoat and guitar, cigarettes cheaper than food. But today he promises four sandwiches, two for each of us. The landlady, a Rumanian widow, has nailed a death mask over JC’s bed, sleeping plaster face of a drowned girl peaceful in the dark. As the girl contemplates water and pigeons batter the window, JC spreads the last deviled ham on two slices of bread, presses them together, then slowly tears four pieces. “Here,” he almost sings, “four sandwiches.”

For  Jack Agüeros (1934–2014) I was eight when the blackout struck and the lights died all across the city like a massacre of fireflies. In the projects of Brooklyn, I steered myself to 14F, fingers spread against the cool tiles of the hallway, past the concrete and chicken-wire terrace where I once burnt ants with a magnifying glass. Many years later, at the Chinese restaurant uptown, Jack said:They got any flan here? He was my first poet. I had seen the fireflies in his sonnets blink and float away: Fulano the philosopher in the unemployment line; Blanco the painter, painting in the madhouse; Monterosa the dealer killed by shotgun in a bar on Avenue A; his mother the seamstress and the quick needle of her sewing machine; Jack the moving man, his hands sliced raw. He stacked his apartment with dictionaries in three languages. I knew the raconteur’s grin with every tale:Raúl Juliá is a friend of mine: a Puerto Rican playing Macbeth. He took14curtain calls on opening night. Maybe he would tell me now that flan was not Puerto Rican, or Mexican, or Spanish, but Chinese, invented by a trembling cook to satisfy the palate of an emperor in the Ming Dynasty.No flan, Jack, I said.This is a Chinese restaurant. Two minutes later, he said:They got any flan? I showed him the dog-eared and fingerprinted menu.No flan, I said. When the waiter unfurled his pad, Jack said to him:You got flan? He sang this song for an hour. The egg roll was not flan. The fried rice was not flan. The fortune cookie was not flan.Can we get some flan? he said.Goddammit, Jack, I said. The poets crowded into the bar, striding to the mic. Jack stood with poem in hand, read the title, tilted his head and said it again, studied the page as if the words shriveled up like ants burnt under a magnifying glass, then sat down. I witnessed the massacre of fireflies. A few of us clapped, not knowing what to do with our hands, staring at the sonneteer who lost all his quatrains and couplets in the denim jacket he left on the subway, the words of Fulano still waiting on the unemployment line:The faster you spin, the stiller you look./There’s something to learn in that, but what? After the diagnosis, I handed Jack a book of poems. He dangled the book upside down like a stiff mouse by the tail, something we would sniff  behind the refrigerator. I wanted sonnets. Jack kept singing the chorus of a song: Get me to the church. Get me to the church. Get me to the church on time. At the end, I leaned over Jack’s bed to read his own poem in his ear, but some words come home after the blackout, fingers crawling on the wall. I know what I should have said at the Chinese restaurant:Jack, let’s get some flan. We should have braved the subway at rush hour, straphangers rocking all the way to 14th Street and 8th Avenue, to La Taza de Oro, gone now like Jack, for rice and beans, squid in its own ink, café con leche y flan, Jack: a spoonful of flan for you after all the years of sonnets and bread for me, the steam rising when your hands cracked the crust at the table.

Viejo San Juan, Puerto Rico, 1998 Here in a bar on the street of the saint en la calle San Sebastián, a dancer in white with a red red scarf en la calle San Sebastián, calls to the gods who were freed by slaves en la calle San Sebastián, and his bronze face is a lantern of sweat en la calle San Sebastián, and hands smack congas like flies in the field en la calle San Sebastián, and remember the beat of packing crates en la calle San Sebastián, from the days when overseers banished the drum en la calle San Sebastián, and trumpets screech like parrots of gold en la calle San Sebastián, trumpets that herald the end of the war en la calle San Sebastián, as soldiers toss rifles on cobblestone en la calle San Sebastián, and the saint himself snaps an arrow in half en la calle San Sebastián, then lost grandfathers and fathers appear en la calle San Sebastián, fingers tugging my steel-wool beard en la calle San Sebastián, whispering your beard is gray en la calle San Sebastián, spilling their rum across the table en la calle San Sebastián, till cousins lead them away to bed en la calle San Sebastián, and the dancer in white with a face of bronze en la calle San Sebastián, shakes rain from his hair like the god of storms en la calle San Sebastián, and sings for the blood that drums in the chest en la calle San Sebastián, and praises the blood that beats in the hands en la calle San Sebastián, en la calle San Sebastián.

Poverty is black ice. — Naomi Ayala You leave me sleeping in the dark. You kiss me and I stir, fingers in your hair, eyes open, unseeing. You leave me asleep every morning, commuting to the school in the city at sunrise. The landlord’s driveway, a muddy creek, ices over hard after the freezing rain clatters all night. Your feet fly up, your head slamming the ground, an eclipse of the sun flooding your eyes. You sleep under the car. No one knows how long you sleep. You awake with a hundred ice picks stabbing your eardrums. You awake, coat and hair soaked, and somehow drive to school. You remember to turn left at the Smith & Wesson factory. The other teachers lead you by the elbow to Mercy Hospital, where you pause when the nurse asks your name, where you claim your pain level is a four, and they slide you into the white coffin of an MRI machine. You hold your breath. They film your brain. Concussion: the word we use for the boxer plunging face-first to the canvas after the uppercut blindsided him, not the teacher commuting to school at sunrise in a Subaru Crosstrek. Yet, you would drive, ears hammering as they hammer in the purgatory of the MRI. A week before, Isabela came to you in the classroom and said: Miss, I cannot sleep. Three days, I cannot sleep. Her boyfriend called at 2 am , and she did not pick up. At 3 am , a single shot to the head put him to sleep, and he will sleep forever, his body hidden beneath a car in a parking lot on Maple Street, the cops, the television cameras, the neighbors all gathering at the yellow-tape carnival of his corpse. You said to Isabela:Take this journal. Write it down. You don’t have to show me. You don’t have to show anyone. On the cover of the journal you bought at the drugstore was the word:Dream. Isabela sat there in your classroom, at your desk, pencil waving in furious circles. By lunchtime, as her friends slapped each other, Isabela slept, head on the desk, face pressed against the pages of the journal. This is why I watch you sleep at 3 am , when the sleeping pills fail to quell the strike meeting in my brain. This is why I say to you, when you kiss me in my sleep:Don’t go. Don’t go. You have to go.

The landlord says we have to go. On the night the thermostat read seventeen below zero, and there was no heat on the first floor, the Massachusetts State Sanitary Code appeared in the landlord’s in-box like a spirit tapping bony knuckles on his window, and a letter appeared in the landlord’s in-box like a spirit scratching the words no rent in the frost on his window, and the landlord’s mouth foamed as if he’d swallowed detergent, and the foam froze on his beard, and the landlord’s plumber laid twenty-four feet of baseboard on the first floor, and now we have to go. The landlord keeps his purple vintage 1976 Monte Carlo parked at the edge of the driveway, purple inside and out, paint job and upholstery purple, the color of emperors. The mad emperor Caligula assassinated his cousin, jealous of his purple cloak, and the mad emperor’s mouth foamed as if he’d swallowed detergent, and the foam froze on his beard. The neighbors report a moose sighting today. The moose charges from the woods, mad as an emperor jealous of a purple cloak, sees the purple vintage 1976 Monte Carlo as another moose, and rams Caligula’s chariot with his bristling antlers, kicking the car the way a teenager high on detergent T-boned my leased Toyota Corolla two weeks ago, and so the moose claims his territory, this land without a gas station or a movie theater or a pizza joint or a doctor’s office, and gallops back into the woods, snorting foam. Now come the hunters tracking the moose, crossbows bristling since crossbow season is upon us, their vision blurred by a night of Red Bull and detergent, and see the purple vintage 1976 Monte Carlo as a moose, firing volley after volley of arrows into the windshield, and the talisman of the air freshener hanging from the rearview mirror does not keep the glass from exploding, and the jumper cables coiled in the back seat do not rise magically like electric eels, and the hunters explode in a cry of huzzah, waving their crossbows as if their arrows thumped the hump of Richard the hunchback king. The purple vintage 1976 Monte Carlo is a dead moose, tow truck dragging away the carcass to a round of applause in my brain. The landlord will snort and foam, demanding to know why there is nothing left but his mutilated vanity plate stamped with the year 1976, and I will speak to him in Brooklynese, palms turned upward in the universal gesture of the uncooperative witness. He will keep my security deposit, his territory without a gas station or a movie theater or a pizza joint or a doctor’s office. I say huzzah.

for the 43 members of Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Local l00, working at the Windows on the World restaurant, who lost their lives in the attack on the World Trade Center Alabanza. Praise the cook with a shaven head and a tattoo on his shoulder that said Oye, a blue-eyed Puerto Rican with people from Fajardo, the harbor of pirates centuries ago. Praise the lighthouse in Fajardo, candle glimmering white to worship the dark saint of the sea. Alabanza. Praise the cook’s yellow Pirates cap worn in the name of Roberto Clemente, his plane that flamed into the ocean loaded with cans for Nicaragua, for all the mouths chewing the ash of earthquakes. Alabanza. Praise the kitchen radio, dial clicked even before the dial on the oven, so that music and Spanish rose before bread. Praise the bread.Alabanza. Praise Manhattan from a hundred and seven flights up, like Atlantis glimpsed through the windows of an ancient aquarium. Praise the great windows where immigrants from the kitchen could squint and almost see their world, hear the chant of nations: Ecuador, México, Republica Dominicana, Haiti, Yemen, Ghana, Bangladesh. Alabanza.