Walking El Pulguero

Walking at El Pulguero, a tarp shines next to the dog track. The dog track a bowl similar to the Colosseum, but with steel poles subdividing the voyeurs and attending bidders, tickets yellow and flapping in their hands. Greyhounds on the billboards    ... I walk under the stands. Bracelets in a jumble under the black- marker-scribbled advertisement brown board. It exemplifies the innocent rebuttal to being cultured by my particular country — the country of my birth, though not quite my teaching. The Cuba of the womb, of the in-walking-distance- of-the-beach land in my memory, with shouts beside our houses at the corner belonging to the distribution agency. Fruits, mangoes, milk, soy beef, when that traveled our way, divided and partitioned by an old minibus with a man in an apron and a smudged baby blue shirt. I remember soda bottles being carried off up our streets, but by who I don’t remember. Too vintage a memory to properly retell. Orangey glued to the burn of sunset on time that young inside — I as well draw from that very same exclusion, a pleasure from this participating memory. My childhood was a happy one, albeit the pangs existed, sharp like a battery, violent, sorrowful, but elastic, coming back at night home, be it dark inside the house. This indictment, the personal exclusion goes timid up my skin and neck. At the Pulguero or not, I’ll find something to bother about. It is that time, turbulent and worrisome until later. It is just not only this place. And so I reap from the crystalline sky, the mangled trees, the faux marble and jet furniture with gold filigree forming a subtle Chinese dragon what I can. The gold iron floor lamps. The off-brand running shoes — Fila, but not really. Always apart from what includes me. Vaguely includes me, is chummy enough, falling out of the tether when more incisive probing corners along. And so in my cooperation- less demeanor, I shuffle further into the flea market, never benefitting from the seductive resignation of allowing everything a true potential buying power. • The baby marmoset gurgles when belly-rubbed. Deserted by its mother, the video lector tells us. The YouTube bubble incarnadine in the corner. A hibiscus, a bee dropping from its flight. One dreams it could be okay to keep the little monkey for an alarm clock in the a.m. A gang of marmosets intertwines among the branches. The ground heaves an ash coloring. I bogey my apprehensions on the little primates flinging. Bug-eyed, I read their spastic jerking as uncohesive with my stock of reality. • The stony wheel gurgling in its solar pickling. Moss underhand, the water running its cataracts of limpid murk. The wheel has cracks in the stony center. • A frittata offered to us by a resident. He’s a culinary student. It was surplus practice. And oats on the bread loaves also in the offer. He’s a kind gentleman, toughened by who knows what. He’s staying here at the shelter and I’m too coward to ask about his life. Like a scouter of fumy billows, we all happen upon the hits which we must report to someone. And god knows how they’ll take it. • I listen in on the praxis applied to the nexus in accelerating, intimate make-out fondling. I feel it with every go at the mouth and lips, teeth testing their courtship at submittal, effusive biting. • The phone shelly, an onyx coat warm in the jacket pocket. A regulator’s annual finish like a yearling passerine flickering on the computer screen.