Louis Mendoza

...Aficl Ko&rlqutz

Who's dreaming in Cuban?

En este sueno, I find myself surrounded by tall phosphorescent walls, paint cracking and crackling, products of heat and humidity. The sky looms years over my head, changing continuously, ceasinglessly in shades of deep mauve, guayaba, amber, and azul vitral like a billion bits of litmus paper scattering in the wet coastal winds. I can smell the resin from a fresh naranja on my finger tips. La sal del mar en mis lagrimas tastes like the sand under my bare feet. Sepia toned people, negros y blancos y mulatos y rubios y triguenos, hybridized populations clinging to long forgotten lineages, reyes and caciques, litter the sidewalks and streets selling their artisanias to tourists, to me.

Time stands still; but I can't tell if it's a function of my dream or just the nature of the island. El Lider parades down el Malecon in a rusted green jeep, decrepit, like him and the people and la tierra. Waving, saluting, shouting, fortificando el pueblo, but what's new? The crowds disperse and lines form, streaming from las panaderias and las bodegas, libretas in hand. So I'm swept up in the human tides and tossed around until some abuela takes pity and stops to talk to me. As kind as she seems, all I notice are her thick, white, open-toe, sandals and the brick red gloss of her aging feet. I don't remember looking at her face; solamente the red of her toes, the navies of her dress, and the aquas of all the atmosphere around her. like she could command the weather with a twirl of her fat body.

- Quien eres? I don't know - Como te llamas? I don't know - Eres cubano? Yes... I don't know. Creo que si.

Estoy perdido but I know where 1 am. My grandmother talks to me too. But she lives en Miami with the rest of my familia. I'm lost; even in my dreams, the island can not belong to me. Nauige el mar to run away. Escape, and can t come back. If my mother knew where I was. she'd shout "atrevido" and make me come home.

El hogar. surrounded by the sounds of rain and radio Mambi in the shade of ^a'"" n , eS . " a( ^S\ gainvilleas. mired in mangroves. 90 miles ofdisoriennrrnnd H n *L ^ fS , ne9rOS - arfOZ hlanco - y bistec empanizado. V ^ me how 1 §ot here" A neet °f P^er the national boats, la armada de Mtam, and a sleeping pill. Ando perdido and solo. wi!h another million brothers and sisters, wading in the salty playas de Varadero and South Beach.

Somos-8

KrUbaltt Cyjjtcrx

dreaming again

waking warm and sweaty from a nap on grandma's bed (which always smelled of dried soap and rose cream), I would toddle my way to you, you slept in an olive-green recliner covered with a bed sheet paper-thin from wash and blooming faded marigolds, i would clumsily nestle in the crook of your arm and begin to dream again. together, our snores drowned the roaring of the 1972 general electric fan.

many a memory i made there- gumming the gamesa cookies grandma always gave me, watching you leaf through a newspaper you picked from the metal bin aside you...my eyelashes fluttering in and through consciousness.

how safe i was, and warm, i remember your brown, wrinkled skin, leathery from work in the factory, covering my babysoft hands, clammy from holding my teta..

years...

and the sadness i felt two weeks after your heart stopped, finding the empty pepto-bismol bottle you finished at my house, my heart stopped, too.

i cried for you three years after you died, a crazy year that was -junior high- driving me, driving mom crazy...until i felt you hug me, your brown, leathery skin this time protecting my baby-soft spirit, clammy from life without your hands, without your laughter.

sometimes, when i visit grandma's house, i like to sit in your olive-green chair, now covered with a patchy afghan, i lie in the recliner, warm and motherly, with my brother in the crook of my arm. quietly, i remember you to him and, when i close my eyes...

i can dream again, too.

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