up the mountain,
winding through dust,
our forest so dry
on this fever-hot day
during a season when rain
normally pours.
Drought.
Climate change.
Sorrow.
No, I can’t stand those sorts of thoughts,
not constantly—so for now, I concentrate
on the beauty all around me, tree-sized ferns
with their feathery greenness, coffee farms,
shady jungle, and somehow, the survival
of waterfalls.
Even in the village where I go to school,
everything looks so dazzling
today.
Rare
EDVER
I’ve never had a pet.
Mom travels too much.
So when I decide to open the door
of the cage, I feel a twinge of envy.
My sister has probably owned
every kind of animal that most kids
get to keep—dogs, cats, birds, fish. . . .
This parrot is brilliant, colorful—
white forehead, ruby cheeks, emerald body,
royal-blue wings, intelligent eyes.
Abuelo says it’s a Cuban amazon,
an endemic species, meaning that it isn’t found
anywhere else on Earth, just here, right here,
this island, this jungle, the one place Luza
calls “our forest,” like some sort
of family inheritance,
a treasure.
Home!
LUZA
After the captive parrot rises up to join
its wild relatives, all the other hitchhikers
get off at various coffee farms, but we
keep going, the truck driver happy
to accept my brother’s
foreign money
as payment
for reaching
the highest home
on our mountain.
We don’t have to hike at all.
He drops us off right in front of the peeling
blue door.
Papi’s horse and my pony are both here,
so that means no one is patrolling today.
I hope a poacher doesn’t take advantage
and trap the freed parrot
all over again.
Home?
EDVER
The house is cabin-sized,
with lemony yellow walls,
a red tile roof, and a faded blue door
that’s ready for a paint job.
There are flowering trees everywhere,
red, pink, gold, white, and purple.
Was I really born here?
A horse, a pony, chickens, a wiener dog,
and strange, ratlike animals that I recognize
from Mom’s photos—jutías, a relative of pikas
and marmots, but endemic to Cuba, just like
the parrot.
Unique.
Found nowhere else
on Earth.
As if this forest is its own
hidden world.
Cryptic.
Greeting
LUZA
Jutía, our skinny dog, rushes to greet Abuelo.
Dad’s old white horse, Rocinante, whinnies.
My silvery pony, Platero, just keeps grazing.
He’s lazy, just like the wild jutías
that stretch out on branches, half asleep,
enjoying the sunlight that reaches them
between pools of shade cast by red flame trees
and cacao shrubs, with those big pods
that contain the bitter beans
I’ll soon be able to sweeten
for making chocolate.
Our vegetable garden is filled
with tonight’s dinner, colorful bursts
of tomatoes, cucumbers, and melons,
all waiting for me to pick them
and make a cool
juicy salad.
When Papi steps out of the house,
I rush to hug him, but he soon lets go
and wraps his arms
around Edver.
Indoors, I greet the little tree frog
that always chirps from our bathtub,
and the lime-green-and-turquoise lizard
who perches on a wall above my bed,
pulsing his magenta throat patch.
If the frog and lizard remember me,
they don’t show any more joy than Jutía,
a one-man dog
who only loves
Abuelo.
Meeting Dad
EDVER
He’s tall, with curly black hair like mine.
I expected someone older, but he seems
energetic enough to be my big brother.
How should I talk to him?
English, Spanish, Spanglish,
or just truly cool scientific words,
all those Latin genus and species names
that Mom sprinkles into practically every
sentence?
He tries to hug me,
but I yank the microscope
out of my backpack
and fill his hands with its
hardness, so that he can’t
pretend to love me
after all these years
apart.
Fumes
LUZA
My rude brother calls Mamá
from the old wall phone,
our home’s only gadget
for communication.
It’s the only phone I’ve ever known,
the one that I’ve never used for trying
to contact my mother,
even though she once wrote
me a letter, offering her number.
Why should she be included
in this awkward
little family reunion,
when she’s the one
who chose
not to be here?
She must be asking to talk to me now,
because Edver tries to hand me the phone,
but no, no, no, I won’t, even though she’s all
I ever think of on my gloomiest days,
those mornings at school when I’m bored
and can’t stop daydreaming
about how cruel she was
when she took
baby Edver
and rushed
away.
What good will it do to talk to her today,
bringing her voice close, while her heart
remains distant?
I feel like one of those dragons
in that strange video game
my brother always raves about,
with beasts that spew toxic smoke
long after the flames
of rage
vanish.
Abuelo has always described Mamá as a wildly
unpredictable person, the brilliant mind who moves
likes a storm in wind, with ideas of her own, ideas
that she treats like children, while treating
her real children
like passing thoughts
that can care for themselves
or merely fade away,
fruitless.
Now, Edver has added a new way to solve
the mystery of our unusual mother.
He says she’s creatively crazed,
explaining that geniuses
often forget to notice
the people around them.
If only I could be
the daughter of a brainy
innovator
who also has
a heart.
The Next Morning
EDVER
Mosaics.
Masks.
Statues.
Painted boulders.
Pebble people with plastic
trash eyes.
My sad sister
’s sculpture trail—
the first place I explore on my own.
I’ve imagined this forest all my life.
Branches rising,
tangled up with sky.
My shoes leave zigzag prints
in fresh mud,
the softness of mist
from last night’s damp clouds
almost as wet as real rain.
Mossy earth, snail shells,
the shimmering, dark eye-shine
of a bright orange oriole, and parrots,
so many green parrots wildly clacking
from the feathery fronds
of a towering
palm tree!
Maybe the bird
I set free
is up there right now,
calling down to thank me.
The Family Mosaic
LUZA
Going off on his own is an insult.
If he steps on my statues, I’ll kick him.
These feelings are so disturbing.
Never before have I ever imagined such fury!
Envy and temper.
Like a chicken and her egg,
which comes first?
I can be just as rude as my foreign brother,
but what good would it do?
I’m just one broken shard of glass
in this sharp, glittering world
of separated
siblings.
Warnings
EDVER
Mom assured me that there are hardly any
big, scary animals in this jungle, just birds, bats,
iguanas, frogs, boa constrictors,
and those cute little jutías.
Pronounced hoot-EE-ahs
not joot-EYE-as
like Luza said
when she teased me
about knowing
more English
than Cubanness.
Mom warned me about the small size
of this forest’s creatures because she thought
I’d be disappointed if I didn’t get to see
monkeys, tapirs, and sloths,
all the tropical species you see
in rain forest books.
She’s wrong!
I’m glad there aren’t any poisonous vipers
or hungry jaguars, because I’m only brave
on a phone screen, not outdoors, where trying
to learn how to surf in Florida
made me so nervous about sharks
that I couldn’t really enjoy
the roll of waves
or sparkle
of sunlight.
It’s all I can do now to stay calm
while surrounded
by disease-carrying mosquitoes,
and ants—tons of ants, big ones in endless rows
marching as busily as an army, each one carrying
a sliver of leaf that looks like a green knife.
Instead of telling me there wouldn’t be any
scary predators in this forest, Mom should’ve
warned me that I’d be stalked by my angry sister,
a glaring, staring, troll-eyed cave bear.
Usually I like being the dragon in a game,
but if I had my phone right now, I’d choose
a sword, and become an armored knight,
completely human, the most dangerous
animal
on Earth.
There’s no weapon more frightening
than another person’s
distrust.
No Warnings
LUZA
I didn’t know what to expect,
because Papi and Abuelo haven’t seen Edver
since he was a baby.
In the kitchen after breakfast, my brother
comes home as if he never left, then he shows off
his knowledge of microscope knobs and lenses,
while I wash dishes, and send my mind flying
back to a time when Abuelo
took me to visit a teenage cousin
who works on a crocodile farm
in coastal swamps.
Her job is painting splashes of yellow clay
onto the cheeks of tourists who come in boats
to see statues of the Taínos, los indios who thrived
in Cuba long ago, and who still are completely alive
in our own family’s DNA.
I picture those spiral twists, the double helix
that geneticists found when they came to our forest
to study us—explaining that we’re descendants
of survivors, our blood, saliva, and bones
all filled up with clues that show
how long we’ve been here.
Five, ten, maybe even thirty thousand years.
We’re a Lazarus family, our ancestors classified
as extinct
by every history book
on Earth,
until DNA studies
proved that los Taínos
still exist.
So now my cousin’s job is standing in a caney—
a palm-thatched longhouse—on a dry patch
of land surrounded by water, painting
the faces of foreigners who go there to see
marvelous statues left behind
by an artist.
Sculptures of people with names.
Individuals, not just a tribe.
Yaima, a little girl, Abey the crocodile hunter,
Cojimo, with his hairless dog, chasing furry jutías,
Tairona, hunter of ducks, and Guamo, the musician
who plays a conch shell,
Yarúa and Marien,
two children kicking a ball,
and Alaina the weaver girl,
her mother, Yuluri, spinner of wild cotton,
Colay, a man planting yuca,
Bajuala, the boy who talks to macaws,
Yabu, a farmer of corn, Guacoa, a man who lights fires,
Arima, a girl shaping clay, and Guajuma,
the woman who decorates ceramics.
la muchacha soñadora, the girl who dreams.
Did Dayamí ever wonder about the future—
imagining her descendants, picturing me?
I always thought meeting my brother
would lead me toward Mamá, but now I see
that even if I had a way to reach Miami
I’d still be alone in certain ways, because now
when I daydream,
I no longer know
which way to face—
future or past,
Mamá’s adopted
foreign shore
or my home,
this forest.
Truce
EDVER
Abuelo and Dad make us sit down
and talk.
The discussion starts with confessions
of temper
and envy,
then moves on
to a confusing duel of visions
for our future—one home or two for me,
but no choices for my sister, because all she gets
is whatever she was born with, and no one
but our mother can ever afford to send Luza
on an overseas trip.
By the end of an hour, Abuelo is reciting poetry,
Luza answers with her own verses, Dad sings,
and I return to the reassuring microscope,
determined to figure out how many
diamondlike facets I can find
on a housefly’s amazing
kaleidoscopelike
compound eye.
Maybe my sister’s odd, complicated art works
aren’t so bad after all.
I think I’m starting to understand her fascination
with magic realism.
Here in Cuba, everything seems all mixed up,
tim
e going in circles, the past still alive
inside everyone’s
mind. . . .
No wonder Mom cries while she writes
on her laptop, hiding her face by letting
her long hair swish like a curtain
at the end of a play
filled with smiling
happy actors.
Maybe she hates
being a lonely
genius.
Chores
LUZA
Gardening, cooking, grinding coffee,
grooming horses, gathering eggs,
waiting in food ration lines
down in the village. . . .
Edver admits that he has never done more
than clean his own room, make his bed,
and pretend to listen when teachers
tell him how to do his homework.
Somehow, he ends up with perfect grades,
while I study and study, never mastering
all the concepts of revolutionary history,
so that I only excel in art
and the underappreciated skill
of imagining.
Contests
EDVER
No cell phone.
No ready-made games.
The evenings are just an endless stretch
of telenovela soap operas from Venezuela.
When we get tired of watching grown-ups
fall in and out of love, my sister and I begin
inventing new ways to defeat each other.
Luza is the best actor when it comes to imitating
an ogre, but I’ve been a dragon for so long
that I’ve perfected the illusion
of dangerous flames.
So we end up calling it a tie.
Equality.
A compromise.
Peace.
Play
LUZA
I love telenovelas, but I also crave victory.
Sometimes our games are old-fashioned.
Edver wins at chess, but my hands swoop
like birds when we play dominoes with Abuelo.
My brother wins at cards, but I can kick a fútbol,
and when Edver invents a makeshift skateboard
from a slab of wood and some rickety
desk chair wheels, I balance so easily
that afterward, he admits he feels clumsy
trying to learn how to ride Papi’s horse
and my pony.
But we’re not ready to give up competing
and comparing, daring each other to leap
higher, jump farther, race faster,
and shout louder.
Are we friends yet?
Maybe.
Almost.