El Lector

Key West

Your father tells lies about how it began, 

your father tells it that he was El Lector. 

He walked the aisles of immigrants, 

their hands browned and fists sore, 

to stand above them on la tribuna, in the smoke, revered. 

He read Cervantes emphatic with gesture, 

his Castilian brought life to La Voz de la Suciedad. 

You’re as certain this isn’t the truth  

as your father’s certain it is. In your version, 

your great-grandfather comes from Cuba 

and he is merely one of those cigar rollers. 

But narrative is all that’s left, so much 

of where you were born only exists in folktale. 

The pattern of barreling down to build more 

and higher has made a mass-produced tropic 

of your birthplace and exiled to memory 

all that is native, your legacy an oral lore, 

a telephone-game mythology.

The only truth you know is that you are confined 

to this island, set in the coral stone of your birth. 

The past only foretells when read backward. 

So I listen to you tell me your story in circles, 

a curse our children will inherit: 

their chronicle a catacomb that can’t be unearthed.

The Dangers of Touching

The guide warns us against the dangers of touching

the cave’s stalactites growing in underground dark,

longer with the seeping water, almost as if it would be soft

if you touch it, blooming cotton ready to fall in.

The cave’s stalactites growing in underground dark

take us home, to where the reef’s delicate coral dies

if you touch it, blooming cotton ready to fall in, 

inside itself, the oils of your palm poison to the sea-forest.

Take us home, to where the reef’s delicate coral dies

and we’re powerless and we’re tempted to push the earth

inside itself, the oils of your palm poison to the sea-forest

and to cave teeth. We go into our room instead, 

and we’re powerless and we’re tempted to push the earth

with our bodies, our palms pressed to our skin, the sea-forest

and the cave teeth come into our room instead, 

where we ignore the warning against the dangers of touching.

Our Life a Stereoscope

Because of you, I am dying. Like the rat 

our landlord is poisoning to make us feel

more comfortable where we sleep at night, 

my days are numbered. I know it more

each night I try to sleep on your rising,

falling chest. When you search my eyes

I see reflected in them two long, shining

caskets. These tiny pictures have grown

clearer the longer I’ve let myself look, 

our life a stereoscope, the other slides 

changing as quickly as you blink, the back-

drops shifting to sun-heat, to yellow leaves 

before I can focus clearly, before I can 

make out the shapes of our bodies clinging 

more tightly to one another, until there is 

nothing to hold, nothing to touch, nothing 

to see but the long box on the frozen ground. 

You’re explaining how the bait works inside 

the small body of our house rat, how he’ll bleed, 

and I stop you. I already know.

Big Pine Key State Prison

The day before our wedding,

we decided to break into the prison

after reading a headline that it had been 

shuttered, the men emptied from cells,

the halls filled by the kind of quiet and echo 

you could almost touch.

You pried where a board looked loose, 

your knuckles scraped and bled 

where you pushed inside.

Getting in was the hardest part. 

There were no heavy bars 

in the hallways,

only doors, left open forever, 

the inside becoming freer 

than the outside had been.

We whispered – afraid 

even the emptiness would hear us – 

about how boundaries work 

both ways, letting someone in so easily 

confused with locking someone inside. 

We shouted to hear who was louder,

how our voices blended in the air 

then were gone. 

The floors weren’t concrete 

and stained with the memory of bodies, 

as I expected, but artifacts made nests 

in the corners of each room, 

what had been taped in front of beds 

and hidden inside books

we rummaged through.

I found a sketch of a snow-scape 

and some glossy prints 

torn from the wall: a family 

in the sunshine. I imagined them 

on a farm, wide open space. 

We couldn’t tell by looking 

which one was the prisoner 

but we each guessed, deciding finally 

he may not be in there at all. 

When I suggested we go to Vegas for our honeymoon, this is what I had in mind.

He scrolls photographs of giant arrows

and bigger-than-life sized cowboys,

lightbulbs bulging from their ten-gallon hats

and stars and sunbursts poking the ground

with points that once poked the sky. 

People envisioned stars once upon a time

and they all saw them so fascinatingly

differently. The grounded STARDUST

and JACKPOT make us reconsider what it is

to really win something, what it is to want

to touch something you can’t so badly

that you settle for its dust. This graveyard 

of lightbulbs and steel, dark, yes, but ready 

and willing to light up. The rough edges 

do not scare us, we prefer the rubble 

of what once was to glory. When we arrive, 

we will sleep on the ground under teepees made 

by old signs promising the chance of fortune. 

We will hold each other so tightly despite 

the desert heat, and we will know that right now

it is all hope, and along the way we will shine 

and we will deceive, and we will not become one 

when we become dust, but here, at the beginning, 

you can hardly see the end for the glare.