“Año 57 de la Revolución” by Ana Rodriguez Machado
Poetry Pause is the League of Canadian Poets’ daily poetry dispatch. Read “Año 57 de la Revolución” by Ana Rodriguez Machado.
Año 57 de la Revolución
By Ana Rodriguez Machado
This is year fifty seven. Los tromboneros serenade two lovers
on the wall by the sea. We are as Cubanos should be: warm, effusive,
playful. A father teaches his boy to fish. Pargo, cangrejo, volador, shark.
A woman sings and sells maní at the lights. Poses for a photo
with her thick cigar. Flamboyán red sets in and the sky starts
bleeding. We drive. Avocado-green Lada and melting leather
seats, past the office of No, endless indigo ocean wall, a left
shoe hanging from telephone wire. My camera creeps out
from the backseat window. There will be too much to remember, I know.
We climb up to the Morro and my skin sizzles and flakes, the same skin
that used to kiss all this now sheds and slithers, a snake in exile from itself.
No, thank you, I can’t drink the water anymore. The water.
The water that gives life and dignity and death, that separates here from everywhere.
I regret the way my body moves. Like I haven’t had to shower from a bucket
in years. You wait while I photograph the emptiness. We know all the dogs
are gonna die of scabies. No one’s here to take the misery out. We leave once,
twice, a thousand times. There is no coming back to this. We used to think
we were so big. We were always leaving. The children kept playing
war and we kept drinking the water. We wait for the sun to decide
when everything ends. Las claves keep the rhythm. Here comes the rain.
Copyright © Ana Rodriguez Machado
Previously published in The Malahat Review.
Ana Rodriguez Machado (she/her/ella) is a Cuban diaspora poet and writer living in Toronto. Her writing has been published or is forthcoming in Hooligan Mag, CV2, This Magazine, PRISM international, The Malahat Review, The Humber Literary Review, and elsewhere. Her poems have been finalists for the CBC Poetry Prize, PEN Canada’s New Voices Award, and The Malahat Review’s Far Horizons Prize in Poetry. She holds an MFA from the University of Guelph.
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