Forest World
Page 3
but most are locals who’ve never seen ice unless
it was in a freezer, or a snow cone.
Twirling makes me dizzy enough to fall
but I don’t, because a smiling fisherman
lets me and Luza both hang on to a pole
that helps us balance, while he pulls us to
the edge of the rink, sliding
toward safety.
Divided
LUZA
One fisherman’s friendliness
saved us from crashing . . .
but right across a wide avenue,
standing on the seawall,
skinny men send colorful kites
out over the waves, delivering hooks
into the gaping mouths of distant fish.
In this land of inventar y resolver,
even a child’s toy can be transformed
into a tool, by someone who is
hungry.
Two worlds.
One for tourists.
The other for everyone else.
Abuelo helps me show my cold brother
the tangled combination, with quaint
old streets where costumed dancers
called los Gigantes—the Giants,
leap and swirl on stilts,
while raggedy women
beg for soap,
and starving dogs
follow bored children
as they wait for their parents,
who stand in endless ration lines
just so they can collect
one fist-sized roll of bread
per person
per day.
While we’re away from home,
Abuelo and I can’t get our rations,
and we don’t have much money,
but we wouldn’t feel right
being fed by Tía for more
than one day, so I announce
that I’m hungry, just to see
what my rich foreign brother
will do.
Confusion
EDVER
I don’t understand girls.
My sister wants me to buy food,
but as soon as she sees how much money
Mom gave me, she roars into anger-mode
just as abruptly as if someone had flipped
a switch.
All of this would have been easier if our mother
had bought a special gift for Luza on her own,
instead of just giving me those binoculars
for myself, then putting me in a position
where it seemed natural to pretend
that they were a present for Luza.
I’m getting pretty tired of trying to meet
expectations.
If I had my phone, it would be so easy
to turn into a dragon
and escape.
Wealth
LUZA
When half of a family is rich
and the other half is poor,
how can the two parts ever feel
united?
My brother claims that in Miami
he’s barely average, with nothing
but a cell phone and skateboard,
surfboard, games, clothes, food,
a computer, and plenty
of television.
That’s all he’s ever owned, he explains,
with a deep sigh that makes him sound
helpless.
I guess I can figure out the rest.
No Papi, no Abuelo, no forest.
It’s hard to believe, but he swears
that he envies me!
Survivors
EDVER
I survived emigration—the leaving of a country,
and immigration—the entering of another place,
but Luza survived
staying.
We’re the same, in that one way,
our decisions made for us by grown-ups
long ago.
To keep myself from crying in front of
my tough big sister, I think of the sixty million bison
killed in the US in the 1870s, and how just one
man, a Kalispel Indian named Walking Coyote,
made such a difference by rounding up
thirteen survivors
to start his own herd.
He was a wildlife conservation superhero
long before saving animals from extinction
became popular, and now there are plenty
of bison again, but only because one person
was smart enough to plan ahead.
It’s the same with California condors,
extinct in the wild by 1987, then brought back
by superhero zookeepers, who bred and babied
the last twenty-seven captives, even training them
to stay away from trash so they didn’t
swallow poison.
Sometimes I watch condor chicks
in their wild nests, spied on by a webcam
that makes everyone feel like a scientist.
Is that the sort of thing Mom does
when she travels, sets up those cameras
then sits back and watches?
Why can’t she pay as much attention to me
as she does to birds and bugs? Like those last
two huge Lord Howe Island stick insects that had her
so fascinated, when they were zoo-bred,
and soon exploded
into a population
of eleven thousand eggs
that yielded seven hundred
survivors.
Now the insects will need to be protected
from rats, if they’re ever released back
into the wild, on the world’s smallest island,
where they were found under a single shrub
at the top of the only rocky peak.
Those rats came from ships,
and ate the insects because they were
big, and as crunchy as lobsters.
That’s how I feel sometimes,
huge and strong because I’m eleven,
but also weak and vulnerable
because I’m
me.
Weirdness
LUZA
Whenever we switch to English, my brother
uses words like strange, bizarre, creepy, eerie.
I want to think that it’s just beautiful magic realism,
the way
our mother
took one of us
and left
the other.
But I can’t.
I know it’s not marvelous reality,
but cruelty, or selfishness, or illogical
weirdness, some variation on the theme
of survival
for herself.
Just imagine!
Edver says she leaves him with babysitters
from an agency, sometimes for weeks, or even
one whole month at a time, strangers,
different immigrant women
from Haiti, Romania, or Korea,
people Edver has to pretend
to understand.
So maybe I was the lucky one all along,
even though when I think about
growing up with a mother,
I still can’t help wondering
how her voice would have
sounded, singing
a lullaby.
Blackout
EDVER
My first Cuban apagón.
I’ve heard of them forever.
Lights out.
No electricity at all.
Dark streets.
Voices, instead of faces.
The sounds of people walking
beside an eerie clip-clop
of horse-drawn vehicles
at midnight.
Only a few occasional headlights.
Old cars grumbling, as if they expected
better roads, with signs and lights
ins
tead of banana trees
and avocados.
Luza sets a rocking chair out on the sidewalk
under a canopy of rustling leaves, using
her new binoculars to stare up at a blaze
of glittering stars.
Fire in the sky, bundled up
like mysteries made of energy.
Watching the stars, she starts telling stories,
making them up as she goes along,
first talking about giant fireflies
and glow-in-the-dark dogs,
then turning each weird creature
into a poem or a song.
So this is what it’s like, I realize—being young
and ancient at the same time, feeling prehistoric,
truly caveman cool in one way, but also
sweaty and tired and scared
right here in my real life.
Time travel.
Space travel.
Family travel.
They all seem equally odd—just that short flight
across the few dozen miles of ocean that separate
my world from my sister’s.
Singing, Singing, Singing
LUZA
My voice isn’t special,
but melodies and rhythms help me
fade from harsh reality
into a serenade
of dreams. . . .
Wondering, Wondering, Wondering
EDVER
Each song leads me into a fantasy
of family disaster.
Is the bicyclist I hurt really okay?
Because no else’s thoughts and feelings
ever seemed this real until tonight,
when suddenly
I have nothing to hear
but voices.
Mind travel.
If only I could figure out how to visit Mom
and ask her why she’s such a coward,
smart and bold in every way except facing up
to her abandonment of Luza. And now she’s
sent me away, but she stayed right there
in Miami, defending me from lawyers
and lawsuits, while avoiding the only
family truth that really matters
to me and my
surprise sister.
On Our Way
LUZA
In the morning, we drink strong coffee,
hug Tía, and set off without tickets,
because all the buses and trains
are so crowded that we’d have to wait
a whole week.
So we hitchhike as usual,
on a roadside packed with people
whose faces are exhausted, their bags,
boxes, baskets, and bundles all piled up
in neat rows of patience.
Are there really places where every family
owns a car, and gasoline is plentiful,
and no one ever has to stand in line
to wait, wait, wait,
while sweating?
I imagine that if I lived in a land like that,
my art would be photographs of real life
viewed under the microscope,
or through the magic
of binoculars and telescopes,
instead of mosaics
pieced together
from trash piles.
Time Traveler
EDVER
I can’t believe we’re hitching rides
like hippies in some old movie!
A boxy Russian Lada,
then a sleek 1957 Chevrolet,
horse-drawn Volkswagens,
flatbed farm trucks,
so many vehicles
take turns
carrying us,
moving us,
bringing me
closer
and closer
to meeting Dad. . . .
But what if he doesn’t care?
He didn’t even come to the airport.
Maybe he was glad that Mom took me away
when I was a baby—what if they didn’t even
fight about the separation?
Dad probably chose Luza
because he knew I’d be trouble,
the kind of kid who crashes into strangers
while skateboarding.
Thinking all this yucky stuff
while riding in an oxcart
makes me feel like a zombie fossil,
one of those weird scientific curiosities
that gets eroded out of its own
layer of stone, then washes up
somewhere else, so that paleontologists
find dinosaur bones jumbled together
with woolly mammoths and cavemen,
creating the illusion of closeness in time,
but really they’re just out of place,
tricky and mixed up.
Zombie fossils don’t belong where you find them.
Just like me.
I’d call home and demand a quick return flight
to my real world, if only I had a phone
and a signal.
Strangers
LUZA
I’m not afraid of the drivers who pick us up.
Some are foreign tourists in rented cars,
others just ordinary Cubans
who need help paying for gas.
Many of the sugarcane fields we pass
are overrun by thorny scrub, because tractor fuel
is so scarce that working the soil is impractical
unless you have mules or oxen.
But everything isn’t ugly and hopeless. . . .
When we pass towering mango trees,
I spot a migration of magnificent
yellow-and-black-striped
tiger swallowtail butterflies
that swirl through the air
like daydreams!
Maybe science isn’t so boring after all.
If my sculptures never get exhibited, I could be
an entomologist like Papi, studying caterpillars
with their amazing ability
to grow and change.
I wonder if butterflies recognize themselves
while they’re still all wrapped up
inside motionless cocoons,
waiting,
waiting,
waiting,
like hitchhikers
on a lonely roadside.
Coevolution
EDVER
Mom taught me that whenever a narrow flower
evolves a longer and longer shape,
the beaks of hummingbirds
gradually change too.
All it takes
is a few million years.
So now, as we bump along in a horse-drawn wagon,
I picture invisible satellite signals beaming down
from outer space, useless in this isolated place
where people still depend on one another’s
voices
for entertainment.
Could I ever adapt to these electronic limits?
I guess all it would take is the rest of my life
to learn how to survive in phoneless
silence
like my sister.
Quiet Hills
LUZA
Nightfall,
the clip-clop
of horse hooves.
Rhythmic flashes
from dancing
fireflies.
Around each curve
the rising moon.
Abuelo’s long folktales, his stories
of glow-in-the-dark dogs and magical horses. . . .
My brother’s fingers twitch as if he’s longing
to send phone messages back to his real home.
What was Mamá thinking, forcing un americano
to spend time with los cubanos, sharing
our quiet isolation?
Ghostly
EDVER
The missing phone feels
like a phantom limb
after an amputation
during a disaster.
No painkillers.
No antibiotics.
Just wishes.
Time
is so much slower
here.
So I lean into the night breeze
inhaling minutes, hours,
light-years. . . .
Caged
LUZA
By morning, all three of us are talking about
convergent evolution.
Octopus eyes and human ones,
separately developed, yet eventually
becoming similar.
Is that how Edver and I ended up
so much alike
yet also completely different?
When we finally reach a town at the foot
of our mountains, all the morning markets
are already bustling with hungry women
trying to sell handmade lace to tourists,
musicians playing songs in exchange
for soap, vendors chanting about ice cream,
and a poacher offering a rare parrot,
trapped inside
a tiny cage.
Sharing
EDVER
The eyes of the parrot
haunt me.
I pull cash out of my pocket
and buy the bright green bird,
planning to set it free as soon as we reach
the edge of town, but when I flash
all that American money,
I know
I’ve forgotten my instructions.
Never
show off!
So I spend a bunch more on good food
and strong coffee, half of it bought
in a fancy restaurant for tourists,
and the rest from a street vendor
who sells slices of pineapple
and fresh guava pastries.
I buy so much that there’s plenty to share
with all the other hitchhikers
on our final ride in the back of a beat-up
old Russian army truck, four-wheel drive,
roaring, rumbling, and forceful,
like a dangerous beast
in a scary story.
From my lap,
the caged parrot
stares at the sky, then at me,
as if he’s wondering
how he ever ended up
in the same sad world
as selfish
humans.
Climbing
LUZA
We roll and sway all the way