Poetry
Cuba in Six
(© 2025; published in Delaware Bards Poetry review 2026)
I.
If you lifted her out of the sea and lay her
flat to dry over the US, she would stretch
from Chicago to Philadelphia.
Grande Dame Havana would dangle
languid and steamy over Kalamazoo while
Guantanamo would drip flinching
onto Baltimore.
It’s bigger than you think.
II.
Fabled inamorata from Columbus to Castro,
she waits.
Russia flicks ash from his Montecristo;
behind dark glasses his eyes flicker elsewhere
for whatever’s next.
America smirks slouching,
his leather collar popped like James Dean.
Been there. Had that.
Her beauty chases down the years,
nurses a Cuba Libre, taps
a stiletto heel.
When that song comes on the radio,
Cuba remembers again
how she believed all the wrong promises.
III.
She waits
while rain drips from flame trees,
and blackouts roll and ’52 Buicks
with Soviet engines bump down her streets
and small brown anole lizards with star feet
camouflage among fronds or porch railings;
and hucksters pedal bicycles up the morning street
calling pan songs,
and vendors hawk meat heaped on wooden tables
in the noonday sun at the Sunday market,
and guests down sweet espresso from doll-sized
cups like shots.
It’s stronger than you think.
IV.
Remember the Maine?
Teddy Roosevelt and his chums,
giddy as the week before the Harvard-Yale
game, giddy-upped cowboys,
lassoed sons of guns,
Rebels and Union boys both,
into one big Bully for You
for that rough ride up San Juan Hill,
rescuing the damsel,
wresting the victory from her own fingers.
Rearing up in glory, they moved in
to manage the lady’s affairs for decades.
V.
Ricky Ricardo called upon Babalú Ayé;
we imagined color on our black and white screens
until the Cold War suffered heat stroke
and hovered over the thirteen days of the Missile Crisis
when parents froze
before TV sets wondering if this was it.
Then it was over.
We changed the channel back to I Love Lucy.
VI.
Grinning woman grabs me, the visiting American,
at the spirited finale of the church service,
pulls me up for a dance,
pinches hard the flesh on my back
the way an abuela might pinch your cheek.
I bring home a butterfly-shaped bruise.
It’s bigger than you’d think.
Origami
(© 2024; published in Pennsylvania Bards Western PA Poetry Review 2026)
These Pittsburgh streets run through my veins,
over bridges, under tunnels,
folding back on themselves.
I’d lie on my back and watch telephone wires scissor-slice
clouds through the oval rear window
of our ‘57 Volkswagen
when this was a two-lane blacktop.
Now it’s six by the time it rests at this intersection
nestled in the cupped palms of these hills.
This was the way to piano lessons, where seven o’clock stubble
on my teacher’s jaw rasped against the folded white crisp
of his collar as he turned to smile. That’s his house—
where you pay municipal taxes now.
The undulation of these streets double dares my clutch
to play the curves, a balletic hugging of the road,
leaning into each turn of the uphill slalom.
Switchback, fold back, it all folds back
until at the top the sky opens and yawns like it has nothing
better to do than to crack wide, promising freedom
while exposing your gut.
From the third-floor corner unit of the Asbury Villas
I see not a thousand yards away the church where I had
my first job a thousand years ago; my hazing
as a limping hopeful shining mess of a girl,
each day begun with resolve and ending in despair.
Time folds back on itself, haphazard origami,
then unfolds. I follow the fragile paper-thin creases,
lines on a map.
My sisters and I are moving our parents in,
ragged with cheer as we organize their household,
their roomhold, their foothold, their toehold.
They sag, nap-ready toddlers,
overlapping wisdom with tantrums,
and we cajole, we scold, we fray, we fold
and unfold this place into some recognizable shape.
In the hallways I keep seeing people who look vaguely like people
I used to know and if I look hard enough, I see they are,
but now tilted and creased. Three women—
I think it’s always the same three (it’s hard to tell;
they could be us in a few creases)—
sit in the proscenium seats by the lobby elevators
to watch the premiere of “New People and Their Daughters”
backing and forthing through freshman hazing, only graduation
is not all it’s cracked up to be.
At night we go home to the place we can’t go home to anymore,
a house that’s a little drunk, rooms in various stages of dishabille.
We purse our lips like Sunday School teachers and fold.
Back and forth, back and forth, I drive these streets,
switchback, foldback, fold a flap, flip it over, and
I am seventeen.
Fearless, bursting with promise and then
switchback, foldback, fold a flap, flip it over, and
I am thirty-one.
A single mother; I do not feel old enough to drive this car, so
I turn back, switchback, foldback, fold a flap, flip it over, and
I am ten.
Hotdogging on my bike with the banana seat—
I own these hills, soaring through these intersections
without stopping, without helmeting, the wind deafening.
I am invincible.
When she was ten, my mother rode her bike down these same hills.
Sometimes we pass each other.
Switchback, foldback, fold a flap, flip it over, and
I am fifty-seven.
Living away for a decade in a land of prairies and wild skies,
forgetting how these hills tilt and whirl, how they gather me,
how they hold me, how they fold me back and flip me over,
how they unfold me, and
along these fragile paper-thin creases
oh these hills tear me wide open.