Between the Waves  

There was never a single border,  
only the shifting tide of language,  
guavas glowing in the heat,  
the churn of Spanglish rolling in  
before the tide could pull it back.

At the checkout line, the cashier asks,  
"Paper or plastic?"—so simple, so sharp.
I glance at Mama, but her words stick,  
caught between lips and hesitation.
I answer for us. The shame clings,  
her silence louder than any mistake.

Each summer, my abuela arrived  
with stories curled like conch shells,  
her voice full of salt and lineage,  
each word a bridge we crossed halfway,  
somewhere between knowing and forgetting.

She tells me of the women before us,  
how her mother boiled guava leaves  
to ease the aches of growing bones,  
how a girl’s silence could mean strength  
but never surrender. “You carry oceans,”  
she says, pressing a shell into my palm.
"Listen, and you will always know  
where you come from."  

In the humid dusk, I traced my name  
in sidewalk chalk, watched rain  
blur it into something new.
Could memory be pliant? Could belonging  
be washed and reshaped by the wind?

But what of the body—  
its slow turning, the way girlhood folds  
like an old dress, pressed into something new?
What of the hands that will cradle, will teach,  
will shape another name into the world?

I watch my mother’s weary eyes,  
the way she smooths the hem of her days,  
thumb and forefinger pressing the fabric,  
flattening something unseen.
I wonder if I will smooth my own worry  
the way she does—without pause,  
without breaking.

Outside, the cicadas rasp,  
their voices a low and constant hum,  
a pulse threading through the thick heat  
like something old, something knowing.

Here, the neon hum of the city never rests,  
palm fronds shudder against the skyline,  
the edge between past and present dissolving,  
Miami swallowing whole every homecoming,  
every goodbye never quite gone.

At the bodega, my friends are waiting,  
laughing too loud, pressing tamarind candy  
into my palm, the sticky sweetness clinging—  
a small amber stone, a promise of what remains.
We swap bracelets—plastic beads clinking—  
a quiet oath in neon-lit safety.

But between jokes, between  
sips of cola and smudged lip gloss,  
I catch glimpses—mothers’ tired hands,  
names that slip too easily from memory,  
the weight of futures we pretend not to see,  
just for now, just for tonight.

Still, the tamarind sticks,  
a sharpness beneath its sweetness,  
as if warning—this is not just candy,  
but proof of change, proof that  
what is soft can still pull,  
what is sweet can still sting.

As I walk home, salt on my lips,  
the moon folds itself into the bay,  
the water whispering,  
"Listen, listen,"
until it carries the answer away.

Somewhere, I smooth my sleeve,  
flattening the fabric beneath my palm.

Final Call  



The screen flickered in the hush of enveloping dark,  
Michael Douglas pacing, his fate unraveling—  
Fatal Attraction, a movie about consequence,  
its shadows pressing forward.  
But beneath the flickering flames, something was wrong,  
settling into my gut like a held breath,  
bending the air—quiet rupture, breath held too long.  

Five minutes home, five minutes into loss.  
Five minutes stretched thin and hollow,  
filled with the weight of dread and waiting,  
filled with the road wounding back to her—  
wounds layered in time, mapped upon fragile feet,  
circling through lineage, waiting in blood.  
Filled with my world shifting.  
My world already shifted.  

The neighbors had already assembled in solemn witness,  
most tight-lipped, others yielding to grief in sobs and silence.  

There was Bill Edwards, the neighbor across the way,  
broad-shouldered, his southern drawl flickering,  
caught between words. Marlene, his portly wife,  
her red hair dimmed beneath the porch light.  
Bernie, their next-door pal, shifting, too large  
for the doorway. Shirley, his second wife, thin,  
arms folded inward, already bracing against absence,  
looking like she had lost the most fragile thing in her life.  

Then movement—the EMTs carrying her body past them,  
in a white nightgown that ended primly just above her knees,  
not in the grandma style she hated,  
but with a quiet grace between youthful innocence  
and the dignified ease of womanhood,  
an elegy stitched into fabric, neither ostentatious nor meek,  
reflecting beauty that lingered, pride that refused to fade.  

The gown bore food stains but no blood. And  
as she passed fully before me,  
her eyes were wide open, lips parted  
in a smile caught between a gasp  
and the ghost of a smile—everything  
lingering between this world and the next,  
frozen, like her, in a moment that never completed itself.  

Ed, my stepdad, stands lost in the doorway,  
his shock sealing him in place,  
his body answering to nothing,  
his stare hollow until it finds me.  

And there—her beige Lazy Boy,  
its footrest still half-kicked from the final trembling,  
handgrips marked by the last imprint of her touch,  
the whole chair pressed with her final form in the fabric.  
The matching chair was untouched, still waiting.  

The television murmurs onward,  
Tom Brokaw, his voice unfazed, reciting history,  
the U.S. and Soviet Union signing a nuclear treaty…  

The world still carrying on.

                                       2

The ambulance pulls away, its lights dim,
not flashing, just retreating—
just driving away,
first a roar, then an echo, then silence.
  
The neighbors start to leave,
offering the usual condolences,
the usual earnest offers of help,
the gestures of grief  that
vanish with the closing of doors,

leaving my stepdad and me
in the almost empty house,
the quiet hum of the house…

And with my younger mentally disabled brother, Casey—
alone upstairs, unaware of mom’s death below,
the murmurs and hands clutching shoulders,
oblivious to the slow procession of mourning,
unaware of the neighbors streaming in and out
in shocked sobs that fold into the walls,
unaware that the one thing that loved him the most
is gone.

I want to call to him, to tell him—  
but the weight of it presses against my throat.  
How do you explain absence to someone  
who has only ever known unconditional presence?  
How do you break the world open like that,  
cut a line through someone’s understanding of love  
and expect them to move forward as if nothing has changed?  

I watch as Ed wipes the last streak of tears  
with the tips of his fingers,
then drag his hand through his forever-gray hair—  
gray since the moment my mother met him,  
gray for every memory I carry of him.
  
The tears have left his face shallow,
heightening his resemblance to Herman Munster
that my mom, myself and the other two kids-
a sister who lives in Alaska, and a brother
lingering between a move from Texas to Colorado-
would kid him constantly about.

The joke was effortless then—  
a source of warmth, an anchor of familiarity.  
Now, I see only the exhaustion in it,  
the quiet collapse of something once harmless,  
the way grief distorts even the gentlest things.

But tonight, the joke is hollow.  
the house, emptier than before.  
And within it, everything that laughter has left behind.

He stumbles into the next big concern,
letting every one know what had happened—
my brother and sister, his two sons
from his first marriage,
one in Chicago, the other chasing Hollywood dreams.

Yet, before he speaks,
he exhales—long, slow—    
as if steadying himself against the weight of it all,  
his hand hovering over the chair’s armrest,  
uncertain, unwilling to disturb  
what was left exactly as she had last touched it.  

Then, the decision.  
He reaches into the left-side pocket  
of her Lazy Boy, pulling out her old address book.  
Its worn pages, folded corners,  
the ink of her handwriting still pressed deep.

He stares at the first number.  
A breath. A pause.  

Then, he dials.  

                                   3

Her absence lingers, curling into corners,  
softening the edges of untouched cups,  
settling into the folds of sheets that will not be remade.  

Her scent—warm spice and detergent—  
clings to the hallway,  
woven into the fabric of the chair that held her.  
Not entirely gone. Not entirely here.  

Even in silence, she speaks:  
A pair of socks with grip bottoms under the table,  
Isaac Asimov’s Foundation left spine-up on a nightstand,  
a grocery list half-scribbled in her hurried hand—  
as if time had paused mid-thought,  
as if the world had allowed one last unfinished line.  

But time does not pause.  
The television hums forward,  
Tom Brokaw shifts to the next news report,
something beyond  the treaty signed,
ink binding nations to restraint.  

And yet, no restraint was given here—  
not to the body unraveling,  
not to the moment that collapsed too soon.  
In a world of precision, she was a miscalculation,  
a faltering equation wrapped in fragile flesh,  
a quiet failure against something too vast to undo.  

I wonder if  what I inherit is more than memory,  
something beyond the way illness carves paths,  
the  denying the way blood carries warnings.  
Each footstep echoes hers,  
each glance at my own hands  
reveals the future she left behind.  

All conversations we never had,  
All questions I never asked—  
Did she know?  
Did she wonder if I would carry this weight?  
Did she hold her own hands in the quiet and wish  
they were not the blueprints of mine?  

And yet, the world is unmoved.  
It does not ask. It does not answer.  

The road outside hums with motion,  
cars rolling forward into the evening.  
Neighbors retreating indoors,  
their grief folded into the rhythm of routine.  

And still—  

The world carries on.
  
                                   4  

Upstairs, the television hums—Baryshnikov gliding  
in white, his movements sharp yet fluid,  
an elegance sculpted in repetition.  
Casey mirrors him, his fingers tracing  
the weightless air, his feet shifting softly—  
a language of motion, untouched by grief.  

I stand in the doorway, the words heavy  
on my mind. The room is a collision—  
rolled up Disney posters on shelves,
glossy brochures of concept cars on his desk,  
beige ballet slippers folded neatly beside  
die-cast models of Mustangs, Corvettes,
on his bureau and nightstands  
the sleek curve of imagined speed.  
Each piece of his world, a fragment,  
a comfort—unchanged, unshaken.  

“Are we leaving soon?” he asks,  
his eyes locked on the screen,  
his breath syncing to the tempo  
of a dancer who understands flight.  

I nod, my throat tight.  
His mind is ahead of me,  
chasing movement, chasing the next step,  
the space between absence and understanding  
still unformed, untouched.  

He twirls his fingers, slow, deliberate.  
He smiles. “I want to show Mom my routine.”  
His joy untouched, whole.  

I inhale. How do you tell someone  
that everything has shifted?  
That love remains, but presence does not?  
That the shape of memory now holds  
all that she was, all that she’ll ever be?  

A flicker—his face tightens,  
a brief tremor, his brows furrowing  
as if the rhythm has faltered,  
as if something in the air has unsettled  
the shape of his movements.  
For a second, I see it—  
a shadow of understanding,  
a glimpse of absence—  
and then, the rhythm returns.  

His hands lift again,  
his feet shift, gentle echoes of Baryshnikov’s grace,  
not the jumps, but the hands,  
the sweep of fingers across invisible space,  
the pull and release of breath  
as if the dance itself could replace  
what is missing.  

And then: “I have rehearsal tonight.”  
His voice steady, matter-of-fact.  

The world is still moving.  

I nod again. “Let’s go.”  

The strip mall is quiet,  
the dance studio tucked between  
a dry cleaner and a bakery,  
its windows humming with light.  

Casey steps in—comfortable, certain,  
a boy in motion, a boy untouched by hesitation.  
The music begins, soft and nostalgic,  
not ballet, not classical precision,  
but something simpler.  
A slide, a rhythm, a quiet homage.  

His feet move with certainty,  
his body following something beyond technique—  
something felt, something known.  

The instructor watches, nods.  
"This is the best he's ever done."  

And I stand there, unmoving,  
watching him, watching the echoes of her  
in the way he lifts his arms,  
the way his posture carries an unspoken grace.  

My chest tightens.  

He is more than what they expected.  
More than the limits they imposed.  
More than the shape of words  
they used to measure him.  

The duet begins—the instructor guiding,  
Casey following,  
his body folding into something  
greater than motion, greater than memory—  
a love pressed into every step,  
every shift of weight,  
every breath between the beats.  

He danced for her.  

And will dance for her always.

One Last Ride


The highway hums beneath us,  
a silver ribbon unspooling, stretching time,  
five hours folding into salt and horizon.  

She sits beside me in the old Chrysler—  
the Town & Country, once dignified,  
now a relic of polish fading into nostalgia.  
The wood paneling still whispers of its golden years,  
though the lacquer has surrendered in places,  
dulled like the memory of Miami Dolphins victories,  
of stadium crowds she can no longer stand among.  

She glances at my brother, now wedged in the middle seat,  
his shoulders stiff, hands curled around his diecast Corvette—  
as if the metal chassis might ground him  
while history repeats in voices above his head.  

And then there was us—  
my older brother championing revolution, fire in his voice,  
me standing firm on the slow burn of policy,  
protest versus legislation, force against persuasion.  
He spoke of upheaval, of torches in the streets,  
of movements that scorched their way into history,  
citing rebellions that shattered regimes,  
the necessity of chaos to unmake oppression.  
I countered with the patience of paper,  
the ink of deliberation, the weight of slow reform,  
the belief that change, to last,  
must be built from within, brick by brick,  
not wrested in the fever of a single night.  

My sister, debating feminism with me,  
weaving tales of male privilege into animated kingdoms—  
deconstructing Beauty and the Beast,  
challenging the politics of princesses.  
I fired back with counterpoints  
built on Disney’s quiet revolutions,  
quoting Ariel's defiance, Mulan’s resilience,  
arguing the incremental shift—  
that fairytales were learning,  
however imperfectly, to unmake their past.  
She scoffed, naming the villains still drawn too charming,  
the heroines still shaped too gently.  

And between us, my younger brother sat,  
rolling his toy wheels across his thigh,  
waiting for us to grow bored of history,  
to let silence settle in  
like dust in the seams of a worn-out car.  

My mother sighs, brushing a hand across the dashboard,  
the way she once smoothed the wood veneer  
on our old living room console,  
fingers ghosting over the static  
before the game crackled into motion.  

The 1972 Dolphins—perfect in record,  
immortal in memory.  
She remembers how we all crowded around that screen,  
stepdad balancing a plate of nachos and salsa,  
her own voice sharp with joy  
when Kiick took it in for the score.  

I can almost hear her say it now—  
“They never did it again, but once was enough.”  
And I wonder if she means football,  
or life itself.  

The hotel room exists between versions of itself,  
half-modern, half-forgotten—  
maroon carpet fraying at the corners,  
a sleek lamp that doesn’t match the floral wallpaper,  
a desk too new for its wobbly chair.  
Even the light flickers like it can’t decide  
if it belongs in this decade or the last.  
It is a room in limbo, much like us.  

She settles into the bed,  
the pillows stacked carefully beneath her spine,  
the weight of the drive melting into crisp sheets.  
On the TV, The Best Years of Our Lives flickers—  
Frederic March raising his glass,  
Harold Russell tracing the contours of a future  
without the hands he once knew.  

She sighs when Homer tries to hold Wilma,  
the way his body betrays him,  
the way she stays, unflinching.  
The scene quiets something deep in her—  
the knowing that loss cannot be outrun,  
only softened by those who refuse to look away.  

My sister calls from Alaska,  
says the northern lights flared last night,  
green ribbons curling like seaweed in sky.  
She asks if I can send pictures of anything  
her daughter might sketch—  
a streetlamp bending against the wind,  
the way light fractures through a rain-streaked window.  
Then, her voice shifts, careful now, measured—  
she speaks of the future, of what is fair,  
what is owed, what might be promised  
when the weight of care no longer rests  
in my mother’s hands.  
What will be reimbursable,  
what should belong to whom,  
what it means to inherit responsibility  
instead of just the things left behind.  
And always, beneath the calculations,  
my brother—  
who will watch over him,  
who will decide the shape of his world  
when the one who knows him best  
is gone.  

My brother in Oregon speaks of rivers,  
his voice full of exact false cheer,  
the kind meant to mask a quiet weariness.  
He talks about cold hands gripping a fishing rod,  
of waiting for something unseen  
to take the bait,  
of how trout move like ghosts beneath the surface.  
And beneath his words, another thought lingers—  
his wife, frail as she is,  
how she will need tending,  
how responsibility never truly passes,  
only shifts shape,  
only finds new hands to hold it.  

And then there is the shape of what’s to come—  
the joy and the breaking of it, the laughter and its echo.  
A wedding, the shimmer of promise,  
then papers signed in quiet rooms,  
the weight of goodbye settling into drawers.  

A body betraying itself, the stark syllables of diagnosis,  
the fight, the frailty, the waiting, the return—  
cancer like a storm that bruises the bones,  
then fades into remission,  
leaving only the knowledge  
that not all things come back untouched.  

The love of my brother, steady as the road beneath us,  
the joy of tending, the ache of duty,  
the fear of expectations unfolding  
in silent negotiations I do not yet understand.  

And then maybe a tornado,  
ripping through the known world,  
splitting the timbers of a home  
that once stood unwavering.  

But a new house will rise,  
new walls will carry voices,  
new foundations will hold weight—  
my brother, my wife, my dog,  
a life remade in the wind’s aftermath,  
a future stitched from everything that came before.  

And my mother—  
she watches my younger brother  
the way a lighthouse watches the dark,  
aware of the storms ahead,  
of the care I must carry  
when she no longer can.  

She hums the Dolphins’ fight song softly before bed,  
a hymn to all that lingers, to all that fades.  
Then, almost without thinking,  
her voice shifts, slipping into Belafonte,  
A Hole in the Bucket, the rhythm of trying, of mending,  
of things that will never quite be whole.  
Then Day-O, a call to the dawn,  
a melody of labor and waiting,  
the night giving way to the light  
that does not always come.  

She came from thirteen—  
six brothers, seven sisters,  
her name the last written on the family roll call,  
though not the last to leave.  
She will be the middle one to go,  
just after the final brother,  
after the first three sisters,  
her place in the lineage somewhere between memory  
and the spaces left behind.  

And I wonder—  
when the tide turns,  
when the wind shifts,  
who will sing it for her?

This is the first time I've been in this mango grove,
hearing the iguaca sing, since my parents left this island

It is mid-July and I am wearing my dad’s old hat palm pava    
square and jaunty on my balding crown


quietly stealing this fleshy passion fruit, its skin warm on my palm, eager to be ******, before the jibaro with their cutting poles awaken—


these violently soft things who delight in the rude noises
made in the slush of their kissing—


their fibers glad to be forever stuck in my teeth
pretending beginnings on new beginnings.                                            

“This year, the mangoes are abundant,” my father used to say to me, his voice blending with the birdsong.

He takes a bite and hands me its yellow-red splendor
to try.  Instantly, I am heartbroken—pierced and open.

I realize, this will be my last time here in this shifting, slow heat  
and I will struggle to remember and feel what it was like  

                                            to touch and eat-- abundant mangoes.

I tried on several of my father’s
old Brooks Brother suits
just before his funeral,
trying to save myself the expense
of an outfit I didn't need.  

Each was too tight on the collars.
too short on the sleeves, each
crotch inseam strangled my manhood.
I had outgrown them all.

Almost all of it will go to Goodwill-
except maybe for those old coal wingtips,
(still in their slightly battered but original box)
heels and soles worn down from hospital rounds,
the leathers evenly laced, spit and
polished to a proper navy shine,
solid and smooth, enough to go from
monolithic to Marley vinyl
without missing a beat.

I could almost hear “The Great Pretender”
play as he glided my future mom
(literally,”The Beauty Queen of Fulton Burrough”)
across the ballroom floor, and then,
suddenly stop, and leave her,
as the hospital pager buzzed on his belt.

All my father- a short, balding but
approachable looking guy, with the
devil’s goatee- ever needed to win
my mother over, was Nat King Cole.
What he left her with, was Harry Belafonte
swooning his existential sorrows out to her-
“Day-o, midnight come and I want to go home.”

I smelled the stale odor of talc
distinguishing itself from moth *****,
and was tempted to slip them on,
but figured the cost to resole them
wouldn't be worth the price. Besides,
that oxblood polish would be too hard
to find.  I left them there for the next
tenant to decide their fate.

Buried fallen leaves,
Now a skeleton for crows to roost,
The branches look full again.

On my father’s house
three slaves and six horses
died when the old stable blazed
a  century and a half ago,
and three union and
two confederate soldiers
slayed each other
in a forgotten skirmish
a few years later.
Their skeletons were found
two years after the war
under an uprooted white pine.
The county let the field return to forest,
except for the old stable.

My father, a nonresident,
cut a dirt road through
the upper quarter,
built a cottage house
over the old stable,
a gate house fifty yards leeward
with a pond in back
and a large windowed manor
that cut a wing between
earth and sky
just beyond
at the edge
of the rocky wrack line to the bay.

Until the houses settled in,
the earth screeched its pain
and revealed its ossified sorrows.
After years this plot
finally  accepted his tranquility.  

My father died and was cremated
far away from this adopted place,
He  returned only because
his will demanded
his celebration of life
take place here.

Except for the family,
who undutifully held
onto their allotted share
of his ashes, the attending
mutes, sobers, wailers and criers
faithfully flung
his cremains in the breeze.
They watched, cried,
bemoaned and wailed
as every speck
refused to settle
and blew out to the bay.

Because I can not bury my father in the sky
I burn him and spread his ashes on the ground.

He loved birds yet did not feed them crumbs—
just  caught them in the color of their being.

He would watch the mower plow the field,
watch the hand fill  the feeders with seed

feeling the tranquility of the man-made pond
drift towards him as he pulled the blanket from

his chin and felt the breeze ruffle his baldness,
the bed as high to the trees as a house allows—

all the doors open to the day
                                  the night

the house receiving guest after guest,
the tables inside-outside spread for feasts,

until the last smoke of him singes my nostrils
settles in my lungs (this strange son of his),

floats above the branches into every nest,
leaving behind the clock spring in the fire

this nonparent of the future, this fruit
of his, leaving no seeds of his own.