Guantanamera

1 Minute Read Time

A silhouette of a woman against a orange/red background on a beach with her arms extended above her head — Photo by Alef Morais on Unsplash

Nothing lingers on the lips like a death song, 
my mother says, while shredding cassava

and invoking the spirits—
                Celia Cruz	       José Martí—

or singing blood verse, a church lady 
working the line, refugee intake.

Celia rolling pride through a gap
in her teeth, a cry that is palm tree split

middle-of-night lightning,
and my mother, hands full of seashell witchcraft,

hands full of rooster feather prayer, 
says the ocean tastes different

once we’ve drunk it all, once we’ve bongo beat 
to water bumping on a home-baked raft: we

pilgrims who sway and dip to the sky because 
how close to almost-death is our trombone shriek

and even if we deny it—our blackness 
our fufú plátano quimbombó-ness,

we end up riding the rhythm
on the right pause, roaring lineage on our hips

and in our swings when
we are dancing across the oceans like gods.

Gabriela Garcia

received her MFA in fiction at Purdue University and was a fiction editor of Sycamore Review. Her writing has appeared in Tin House, Iowa Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Ninth Letter, Indiana Review, and elsewhere. She is included in an anthology of second- generation Cuban American literature forthcoming from SUNY Press. She tweets mostly about cats @GabiMGarcia, and you can also find her on www. gabrielagarciawriter.com.

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