Once I soared on an angel with steel wings,
through a piercing blue sky
over the dark belly of a Gulf,
to a land unknown to me.
Stepping out of the airlock turned my clothes into hot laundry
as the warm culture washed over me and my family.
Me in my ten year old body had never left the states,
it was my turn to be the minority.
Akumal,
a small but sprightly tourist town,
filled with little shops and nooks 'n crannies to explore.
My family and I would stay at a private resort for ten days
that rested upon white sands and crystal waves that constantly
licked and salted the air along with the fishermen’s boats.
Crashing splashing crashing,
always the sound of the blue waves crashing.
The birds sing their foreign songs.
Day,
sweltering and bright,
the wee little town of Akumal stirred with life.
Pesos clicking in pockets of fruit buyers,
the treble of am radio words fly through the air.
Clouds of dirt from the road follow run-down trucks and cars,
kids kick around a melon in the street.
Never had to know Spanish to know what happiness sounded like.
At the resort was a more calming scene.
The wind gust across the warm sand, occasionally knocking down a coconut into the squishy sand.
They always tasted like salt water, but my sister and I kept cracking them open, like there might be a pearl inside one of them.
The outside resort had a bar next to the beach, serving the little ones
Pina Coladas and Banana Smoothies. The bartender was an ecstatic man, always with a wide grin of joy, and a loud machine gun laugh.
Night,
the sun would go to sleep, but the ground below was awake
in the shine of the moon, they would come in hundreds.
Hermit ***** would skitter across wooden floors                                                           ­       and blocked out the sand on the beach.
The people of the resort would gather in a beach-side restaurant called "La Buena Vida" or "Living the Good Life".
With its rope swings and crows’ nests, I’d linger in this pirate ship,
bringing my food up in a bucket and laugh down at the others.
Even the condos we stayed in were not familiar.
They felt like native Mexican homes, with the pastel color walls and creative tiled floor.
Falling in and out of sleep there was the ever present crashing splashing smashing of the waves,
and the lullabies of the night birds.
The sun would stretch its way out of the ocean in vibrant hues
and the hermits scurried back to their holes.

©Dylan Whisman.