95 Immigration poems

I have become wealthy in a foreign land gravity makes me sick in my slippery throat the devil makes me lousy with summer like I'm buried in the sun in its sounds with my mother there's something about having a heart beat like traffic like wind I did it afterall: I had a sweaty body in Berlin it was all right I'm taking some time out from being alive with daughters It's OK I'm impersonating a kiss of lilacs a murder of crows are settling over my corpse the dust covers my photographs I only ever write about childhood because that was before I died and now the devil has brought me back to Berlin in summer in Stockholm I'm starting to make sense of my body which is becoming buried in pop music and now ooh-ooh I have to rebuild the wall an erotics based on occupation I write you a letter ett brev about my body as if it were split between foreign words whispered by stringy angels and soldiers who march in through the eye of a needle I write my body with the eye of a needle with nålen I write when I'm sick with gravity in summer in summer I'm sick in light summer light musical light from hell and you dare call it heaven my body you dare to call it heaven

Yesterday I lost a country. I was in a hurry, and didn't notice when it fell from me like a broken branch from a forgetful tree. Please, if anyone passes by and stumbles across it, perhaps in a suitcase open to the sky, or engraved on a rock like a gaping wound, or wrapped in the blankets of emigrants, or canceled like a losing lottery ticket, or helplessly forgotten in Purgatory, or rushing forward without a goal like the questions of children, or rising with the smoke of war, or rolling in a helmet on the sand, or stolen in Ali Baba's jar, or disguised in the uniform of a policeman who stirred up the prisoners and fled, or squatting in the mind of a woman who tries to smile, or scattered like the dreams of new immigrants in America. If anyone stumbles across it, return it to me, please. Please return it, sir. Please return it, madam. It is my country. . . I was in a hurry when I lost it yesterday.

“All accounts of the past are made up of possibilities.” —Dionisio Martinez for Larry Villanueva i. For years, you were a story of ancestors, pre-revolutionary Cuba: Barrios, Donate, Gallata, Villanueva, family names strung and pearled in the Caribbean by blood and memory, nostalgia and calamity en Artemisa, a small town in my mother’s childhood, a woman in December of 1967, your Tía Marta, a hospital room en la Covadonga, rows and rows of children, my sisters, unexpectedly two, your cousins, whose clothes Mae and Mitzy wore into history and exile. En el exilo, La Cuba del Norte, ten years after the summer of El Mariel, you were my map of Cuba, un espejo, un reflejo, a tisa-blue knot of possibility. Mi esquina Habanera, a street en la arquitectura del pasado, a superficial distance in the patina of memory, a me I had never really known, a language I had learned not to think in. Later, you were a face on T.V. en Guadalupe, María Elena, my mother’s telenovelas en el canal 23, an actor, a director, a sculptor, abstract angst with a face history and coincidence had given me. ii. So when you become fingerprints and words, a noun, a verb, a snapshot in motion, I am no longer alone with my ghosts, las sombras de el pasado, inventing truth, reclaiming language, my old self. I am me, unadorned by speech, English or translation; I am an I, simple, exposed, this afternoon in our lives, a conversation about the circle of coincidence and persuasion, a photograph of an idea we once were, and you are familiar, somehow. iii. Constantly returning, we breathe in Spanish, move through blank spaces like incantations, waiting for words to fill a moment (often ninety miles long) with etymology, jargon, ghostwords, shadows and nostalgia, and become Harina de Castilla, Larry, re-shaped, translated, improvised, sculpted and redefined.

My shadow followed me to San Diego silently, she never complained. No green card, no identity pass, she is wedded to my fate. The moon is a drunk and anorectic, constantly reeling, changing weight. My shadow dances grotesquely, resentful she can't leave me. The moon mourns his unwritten novels, cries naked into the trees and fades. Tomorrow, he'll return to beat me blue—again, again and again. Goodbye Moon, goodbye Shadow. My husband, my lover, I'm late. The sun will plunge through the window. I must make my leap of faith.

Say they still tie ropes to the caskets of immigrants they find in the desert. That a rope saves time should someone come looking.

We knew something was wrong when next to the TV, a large tomatillo plant was growing out the carpet. Everything there spoke, Table, Lamps    ... In the living room, Coffee Table’s eyes glued to the TV: flags, drums, hands on the chest on the screen, but it couldn’t have been Independence. It was the fifth of the fifth month, something about a battle won, a battle lost. Our host, Dining Table, handed each of us a green sphere.Eat, s’il vous plaît. Don’t think about it, she told us; then sent Chair and Coffee Table to sleep. Watch the bedbugs. You can’t unlock the windows, Fan in the hallway said. For two weeks Table left tomatillos outside our door. The green marbles punched through our stomachs, so deep, our ears grew roots. It was as if no heat. Bed wished she was bigger. Closet dreaded his clothes. Wall didn’t let us sleep; kept saying, ¡Look! Look over there, cabrones. You’ll never make it there. If you’re gonna ask for the best route, the best price. ¿Where are your suspenders? ¿Dress shoes? You’re not really serious about getting to San Francisco. ¿Are you? Pinche dirty pigeons.

I sent him from home hardly more than a child. Years later, he came back loving avocados. In the distant kitchen where he'd flipped burgers and tossed salads, he'd mastered how to prepare the pear-shaped fruit. He took a knife and plied his way into the thick skin with a bravado and gentleness I'd never seen in him. He nudged the halves apart, grabbed a teaspoon and carefully eased out the heart, holding it as if it were fragile. He took one half, then the other of the armadillo- hided fruit and slid his spoon where flesh edged against skin, working it under and around, sparing the edible pulp. An artist working at an easel, he filled the center holes with chopped tomatoes. The broken pieces, made whole again, merged into two reconstructed hearts, a delicate and rare surgery. My boy who'd gone away angry and wild had somehow learned how to unclose what had once been shut tight, how to urge out the stony heart and handle it with care. Beneath the rind he'd grown as tender and mild as that avocado, its rubies nestled in peridot, our forks slipping into the buttery texture of unfamiliar joy, two halves of what we shared.

I consider the woman’s choice in liberating a red dress with pale-green sandals. My penury depresses me into a staring contest with a melting ice cube. A friend excited my husband with an invitation to pilot a boat with powerful thrusters. My gift of chocolate in pink cellophane failed to make the blonde smile. Consequently, I remind the party-goers that Trans World Airlines painted a new night with nebulae. I could be happy in Alphabet City, buildings crumbling around my notepad. I could be happy sipping iced tea while admiring the seamless face of a pool. I could be happy gurgling back at an infant dribbling green saliva down his chin. I could be happy downing Absolut gimlets (ice-cold, no ice) in a neighborhood bar with pool players providing the music, or a hotel whose walls are laminated with mahogany and where tuxedos prevail. I could be happy with your hand on my waist as you try to identify the scent hollowing my throat. An entire landscape in Antarctica disappears, evaporates until salt becomes the only debris. There are keys to everything, even handcuffs. You could have been happy, too.

Meat-eater, salt-licker, piped spring dribble-sucker, an exiled Bolshevik’s villa at Viareggio. The beach sheep shit crumby money, munificent marks, lire, dollars, Dolorous Daintyfoot, Proudass, Chinadoll, a three-way clut- ter, the piazza pizzeria. Mrs. Smith- Jones, rich, gonged aground a pissoir. At three the imprisoned poisoner’s tea tells her rice-cake fortune, it is it. Who to who? You yew alley ewes knew goatsuckers in Swedish horse-hide hid the boathouse key, locked the oarlock, sung Sam’s nutsy song, Sin Fleet, at night. Night, ketchup cup, pepper-pot, bid bound Belinda break her bracelets: the dirty photographs apostrophize mon- soons. Swimming snakes shake the lake.

we went into a market—they call it a grocery—and you can’t imagine. fruit brilliant as magazine photos. all kinds of different oranges, grapefruits, mandarins, some tiny clementines with a blue sticker—Morocco—they’ve come so far...the eggs are painted with colors corresponding to the days of the week you’re supposed to eat them: a different color for each opportunity. i felt dizzy, the gulf between myself and this place seemed insuperable. tears welled up in my eyes, i wanted desperately to flee, to get outside so i could breathe. i wanted to explain to Phillis, the North American who had invited me, what was happening to me. i tried, but she couldn’t understand: you have to have felt it yourself: the first time. for the first time my mind had crossed over five hundred years of development at jet speed and arrived in the future, a cold future, its display cases filled with artificial snow and artificial heat. there were a thousand things i never knew existed, a panoply of brand names and gadgets for every purpose. i felt like someone from the stone age, and realized most people on the planet never know the era they’re living in, any more than they could know the quantity of living matter in this galaxy that surrounds us, or the milky complexity of the molecules in their own brains, and what’s more they don’t know that they’ll die without ever knowing. i felt terror of that gloss, of the waxed fruit, of propaganda so refined it could dilute the existence of the strange things before my eyes, other sensations: everything wanting to be used up, immediately, licked, tasted, eaten, packaged, mastered. i knew i couldn’t stand this avalanche, this brilliant swarm, for long, these rows on rows of distant faces staring out at me from cardboard boxes. i’d seen nothing singular in the place, no unique thing i could separate out from the amorphous mass of texture and sensation. i began to move closer, imagining i walked with those who have never eaten meat or tasted cow’s milk, who have never nursed except from the teat of a goat. those who have had only wildflowers to chew when the winter hunger comes. i approached closer still, imagining i walked with the salty ones, who collect their water from the public pipe. my nose began to bleed and Phillis said it was the cold; i knew that wasn’t the problem. we were near the seafood display, i moved closer. fish have always aroused in me both horror and desire. i moved closer, like a lost child feeling her way through space toward something of hers that’s hidden. i brushed the shells with my fingertips, they were smooth and delicate, but obviously artificial, made to be used once and thrown away. at first touch they might seem real, pearly, perfect, but they’re actually plastic, and they’ve never even seen any sea.