| Tabebuias in Bloom for José Today is different. When I pull around the corner to approach Sonora's school, I can't help but notice the trees lined along the road. They have burst into bloom, all of them, as if a curtain of rain had unveiled an orchestra of trumpets. I park beneath their branches, as I do each morning. Blasts of yellow clusters blare against the blue as if God himself were uncovering his face. They will not last the month, I think. Sonora slows down and traces each bell shaped flower falling to the ground. She reaches down for one and deliberately mouths each syllable Ta-be-bu-ia gleaming with anticipation. |
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| Renoir, Reader | ||||||||
| Tía Mía I write because I cannot remember at all. That is the last line of the first poem, the first poem I ever wrote, the first letter I never sent. That was 15 years ago. Tía has come to visit. We have finally met. Her hair is white yet silken held away from her brow by two tiny butterfly pins. I'm not sure what I expected. A harsher look, an angrier stare perhaps. Her eyes, crystalline blue, are deep and deceiving, like the cool calm lake I swam in pregnant on those hot hazy months of summer. She likes to tell stories, forty years of untold stories, of endless days caring for our ailing grandmother, of cans of cheap paint and daily lines at the bakery, of buckets of water hauled from the street below and of how they forbid her to speak, nor to think about the children, the children she used to prime in her schoolroom. Tía has returned to the island. I can hardly recall the lilt in her voice. I never expected I would want to seal my heart. Index |
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| Recipe for Love for Belkis and Heberto After 25 years of marriage, to the same husband, I thought I could offer a recipe for love. Tío has come to visit from Havana. He tells me of his 43 year marriage to the woman he met at a guest house, after he was engaged to another, the woman with whom he toasted forty anniversaries of hardships and betrayals, the woman with whom he has met God. We walk along the gravel path leading to the jettys and I listen. |
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