Havana as a Cruise Ship Stop
The sweat pours between my breasts
and the light hurts unless I squint
or take cover in tiny patches of shade,
and everything is bleached a yellow that
feels like delirium.
Palm trees sway over the violet shark-filled bay
as young men ply pedicabs through narrow calles.
People hang loosely in the doorways of crumbling buildings
hoping to catch the least little breeze,
sharing twice-burned smokes
waiting to sell cigars,
or souvenirs, or something,
anything for a CUC or two.
No one offers photos of Fidel.
Our ship’s dock
once received slaves from West Africa,
and our customs check-in was the auction block.
I imagine walking that long promenade,
dressed only in chains,
believing that I’d reached hell, that fate
had stolen me to a place
where walls and water entrap me,
my fate to sweat and fear and suffer
and cut swath after swath of cane
barely breathing, no rescue,
finally drowning.
Havana Viejo,
where we ride in a pink ’55 Belair
up the Malecon, breezing past open Spanish plazas
where fighters once made their stand,
believing that liberty actually
meant freedom,
where explosive art with Ché outsized
comes from isolation and strife,
where the cumbia sparkles with Copacabana passion,
where everything is contraband and nothing is stolen,
where when the light hits the old plaza at a certain angle
I can almost see Papa
hustling down the Avenida to his favorite watering hole
to look for some inspiration
in the bottom of a bourbon tumbler.
• • •
Hope’s Antonym
November 9, 2016, 3:00 am
We lie in the dark
feeling the world convulse.
The west has been won
overcome
undone
by one who bears gifts
of dollar signs and atomic ash.
I moan,
and burrow low in your arms
while you gaze over my shoulder
into the hour
of extinguished light.
• • •
Andrée Rose Catalfamo teaches writing and coordinates a program for first-generation college students at Tompkins Cortland Community College in Dryden, NY. Her work has recently appeared in KeLab Magazine. She lives a happy, literary life with her partner, the poet Burt Myers, in Binghamton, NY.