Forest World
Page 2
fronts of houses painted bright colors
while the backs are like skeletons, open
to a blaze of sky wherever parts of walls
are missing.
When we pass along the edge of the rough gray
coral stone Malecón seawall, I stare at teenagers
who dance around in groups, or sit alone,
sadly watching endless waves
as the blue water rolls toward Miami.
I imagine they’re dreaming of travel,
just like Mamá, when she left home
without me.
My brother
absorbs our shared
sibling shock
by staying busy
instead of talking to me.
Eyes anxious, fingers nervous, he empties
his backpack, exposing gifts of such value
that I can hardly believe the dazzling show.
Soap, shampoo, lotion, all the things
that are so impossible to find here in Cuba.
Like a magician revealing a rabbit,
Edver unpacks a microscope—exactly the kind
Papi has always wished for, a dissecting scope
that will magnify delicate antennae, mandibles,
and wings, exposing all the secrets of insects.
Then, Edver begins to wave his hands around
like whirlwinds as he describes—in a language
neither wholly Spanish nor completely inglés—
the best way
to slap
a blob of dust
onto a thin glass slide, then slip it under
the amazing microscope’s magical lens
so that we can detect a whole spider
the size
of a mosquito’s
eye.
¡Increíble!
Incredible!
And yet, I believe him, just as I believe
in this impossibly marvelous reality of powerful
binoculars that my brother hands to me, declaring
that they’re a special gift just for me, from our mother . . .
even though from his eyes I can tell
she said nothing about me.
Nothing at all. Nada.
Sister Shock
EDVER
At our friendly aunt’s crumbling house,
I demonstrate biological detective work
using the dissecting scope
as I try to think of easy ways
to play games of amazement
with this mysterious puzzle
of a long-lost
instantly rediscovered
Lazarus sister.
I soon learn that dust mites don’t impress Luza,
so I yank a dark strand from my head,
and sit down to show clear differences.
My hair is curly, hers straight.
Maybe we’re not related after all, but we do
have the same reddish-brown skin, black eyes,
fierce glares, and reversed names.
Luza
started as Azul.
Blue.
Leave it to Mom to introduce us
by letting us figure out our own version
of truth.
Adopted?
Half?
Foster?
We seem so close in age,
but Abuelo and his sister—
our tía, a great-aunt—
both insist that Luza and I
are only one tiny
barely noticeable
year
apart.
That makes her twelve,
practically a teenage
stranger.
I’ll definitely need this microscope
to find any bizarre little ways
that we might turn out to be
similar enough to ever hope
for some sort
of unusual
family disaster
friendship.
Or do I even want to understand Luza
and why Mom left her?
Wouldn’t it be easier
to just pretend that this girl
is a stray quirk of nature,
like one of those half-unicorn
half-human centaurs
in my dragon game?
Microscopic
LUZA
I don’t care about peering at a sliver
of dark curl from Edver’s messy
bird’s-nest head.
He’s only eleven.
The difference between his age
and mine
is like the gap between believing
in rabbits
that spring from magicians’ hats,
and knowing
that I can create my own
form of power, lo real maravilloso,
marvelous reality—a style my teacher calls
magic realism.
Art.
Sculpture.
Architecture.
Dreams made visible!
Shapes molded from mud, trash, junk,
all sorts of wasteful ugliness turning beautiful
simply from contact with creative human hands,
my fingers and palms hungry for meaning,
especially when this ordinary world
makes no sense.
So while Tía coats her face with a gift of lotion,
and Abuelo peers into the treasured microscope,
I gaze out a window with these new binoculars,
feeling even more alone than before I met
my wealthy hermano americano
with his fancy presents
and luxurious sports shoes.
Those basketball shoes he wears
probably cost as much as Abuelo’s
entire annual retirement pension—six dollars
each month, and six times twelve months makes
seventy-two dólares per year, or as we cubanos
like to joke, setenta y dos dolores, painful sorrows,
not dólares, not money. Just a trick of spelling,
but it makes a huge difference.
This view from my aunt’s window is almost
as tragic as my disappointing brother.
Tumbled balconies.
Crumbled sidewalks.
On both edges of the jaggedly potholed street,
banana and avocado trees send powerful roots
down into broken concrete, where tiny rootlets
grip slim cracks and split the hardness,
forcing this city world to make room
for natural growth.
On a peeling garden wall, someone has painted
a mural of upside-down-flowerpot hats
worn by people who don’t seem aware
that jungle vines spill out over the brims,
with coiled tendrils clinging to eyes and ears,
making everything green, as if nature
is reclaiming lost territory.
The art festival must have started!
Someday soon, maybe my trash statues
will be included, all my tiny traces of hope
emerging from mosaics of broken things,
ugly things, microscopic shards
of possibility.
Rules
EDVER
Don’t talk politics.
No showing off.
Never eat too much.
No gross jokes.
Never brag about owning
a lot of modern stuff
or being able to afford
to fix broken parts
of our house,
or the way
we shop
for unlimited mounds of groceries
in magnificent, overflowing
supermarkets.
Those were just a few of Mom’s stern orders
when she dropped me off
at Miami International Airport
and let me figure out everything else on my own—
airpo
rt security, departure gate, and then
the arrival: passport, customs, questions.
So I’m trying to be mature and obey
every rule, just to show that I’m truly
responsible, so that maybe she’ll
give me my phone back.
Avoiding politics is easy, because I never really
understood why the small country of my birth
and the huge nation of my daily life
ever hated each other so much
anyway.
Most of the other instructions are even easier.
I can’t be a show-off without my phone,
since my only real skill is flying around
in dragon form, torching snotty trolls
with blazing flames that send my score
soaring.
Burps, farts, ogre poop,
even the funny parts of that game
aren’t available over here.
All I have is my own sense of humor,
jokes that I have to keep secret, as I imagine
my sister in armor,
a clumsy knight who can’t ride
her racing snail, a swift creature that hops
on one thick, slimy leg. . . .
Pretending I’m not hungry is something else,
a painful challenge, almost torture.
Mom warned me that while Tía is an eye surgeon,
doctors in Cuba only get twenty dollars
per month, just like everyone else.
So I’m not supposed to fill my belly
with her precious food rations—the carefully
measured amounts of rice, beans, and bread
that every islander receives.
I’d gobble at least three burgers
if I were home, and I’d be playing on my phone
while Mom stares at her laptop, but instead,
I’m stuck here at this unnaturally noisy table,
surrounded by people who talk, talk, talk,
instead of
politely
ignoring
one another.
My Spanish is fine, but I don’t know all the gestures
and facial expressions.
Each time my sister rolls her eyes, it looks
like a secret message
written in code,
because she has at least fifty different
eyebrow positions for showing how disgusting
she thinks my game is
after listening to my enthusiastic Spanglish
description.
Qué bárbaro, Abuelo says, laughing
as I chat about green elf dientes
and the stinky dedo del pie fungus
of giant centipedes.
Bárbaro means cool, not barbaric,
so I know my grandpa has a sense
of humor, at least when it comes
to elf teeth and toe fungus.
After that, Abuelo and I keep dreaming up
truly cool gross stuff, and then we switch
to amazing scientific facts, like el almiquí,
a species of solenodon found nowhere else
on Earth, only in the wild parts of Cuba.
Everyone thought the strange little nocturnal
underground animal was extinct, until my grandpa
was part of a team of biologists who rediscovered
exactly
one
survivor.
They named the lone almiquí Alejandrito,
because one animal is an individual, not just a group.
Alejandrito had poisonous saliva, so Abuelo
couldn’t touch his rat-shaped body or pointy
cartoon nose, for fear of getting bitten.
So he just watched the little creature
from a distance,
taking photos and scribbling notes,
back in the slow days
before computers and cell phones,
using film and a pen.
The good news is that just three years ago, in 2012,
seven more Cuban solenodons were discovered!
So it looks like this is one more Lazarus species
that actually stands a chance of real-life
survival.
When Luza suddenly wanders
into the conversation, she comments
on how shadowy the negatives of Abuelo’s old photos
look, like a ghost animal captured on paper,
an eerie memory of the last male almiquí
searching for a lonely
female,
only it wasn’t the last after all
so no one should ever lose
hope.
It’s rule number one of cryptozoology.
Never be certain of total extinction.
Always remain willing to accept
amazement.
Maybe that’s how I’ll try to think of Luza,
as someone who claims to be my relative,
but is really just a living fossil, left over
from my parents’ dead marriage.
Resolver
LUZA
Resolve.
Solve problems.
Invent.
It’s the way Papi taught me to adapt
to scarcity and hardships.
No soap?
Trade part of your rice rations
with a neighbor who receives gifts from Miami.
Not enough food?
Grow bananas and avocados on the sidewalk.
Vanishing wilderness?
Appoint yourself guardian of a forest, patrol
on your horse, carve a rifle from wood,
frighten poachers into thinking
you have bullets.
Disappointing long-lost brother
whom you almost wish you’d never
rediscovered?
Ignore him, and imagine
a more satisfying crypto-sibling
hidden deep inside your own
private mind,
sculpted and painted
from daydreams,
like the secret wishes
of some other
more generous
world
in a more serene
time.
Life in the Electronic Stone Age
EDVER
Noticing that my aunt has a computer
but no Internet
is like being on a planet
in the same enormous universe
as Earth,
but so many light-years away
that I’ll never
be able to return
home.
There are old movies, jazzy music,
and exactly two games, silly ones
for little kids, not even worth playing.
So instead of staying cooped up
in that boring house, I agree to walk around
with Luza, looking at all the old junk art she calls
magic realism.
Statues at the Art Festival
LUZA
Red tongues pierced by swords,
rooster-people, centaurs, mermaids,
children shaped like boomerangs.
That last sculpture is easy to interpret.
The boomerangs are Miami kids like Edver,
taken away by grown-ups and now sent back
to meet their abandoned families
for the first time.
Why didn’t our mother invite me to Florida
instead of sending my brother here
on his own, a confused boomerang boy
traveling
alone?
Lost but Not Found Yet
EDVER
Statues of centaurs and mermaids
make me think of Mom, with her grants
for studies of obscure species
that were believed to be gone forever
until a few survivors were found
by various international
&nbs
p; research teams.
Terror skinks in New Caledonia.
Painted frogs in Colombia.
The Lord Howe Island stick insect, known only
from one shrub on Ball’s Pyramid islet,
the world’s most isolated lump of coral.
A giant Palouse earthworm,
three feet long, pale, and squirming,
assumed to have been killed off
simply because it buried itself
fifteen feet deep, where no one ever
thought to search.
Mom isn’t picky about which creatures
she photographs and describes
for scientific and popular magazines,
just as long as they’re Lazarus species,
proving that natural miracles are possible.
Borneo, Ecuador, Brazil—why doesn’t she ever
take me with her on adventurous work trips?
If I’m old enough to travel to Cuba alone,
then I’m wise enough to be trusted
in other jungles.
Right?
She can’t hold the whole bicycle-skateboard-phone
crash
against me
forever.
Can she?
Maybe meeting Luza and Dad is some sort of test!
If it is, I’ll pass; just watch. I’ll be careful.
Or maybe Mom has a boyfriend, or she’s a spy,
or she’s cryptic herself, hiding because of
some terrible
secret.
The Warmth of Coldness
LUZA
I stroll into an unusual statue
that’s actually just a huge blue glass cube
with a person-sized opening on one side.
From inside all that blueness, the whole city
looks like refreshing sky, but this trapped air feels
so hot and stuffy that I rush right back out
to explore the next exhibit, an artificial beach
built just across from the real one.
Best of all, on a corner near the seawall,
some rich foreign artist has constructed
an ice rink!
Hot and cool, caliente y fresco,
a temperature duel . . .
My soul turns toward poetry, the only way
to build a breezy sky-sculpture
inside my heated mind.
Spin!
EDVER
Abuelo says the rink is a symbol of the recent
thaw in Cold War hostility between Cuba
and the US, but my sister calls it marvelous reality,
and I just think it’s icy weirdness, like everything else
in my life.
Still, the temptation is too great to resist, so we wait
in a long line of strangers who take turns
borrowing skates—some look like European tourists,