Chloe Rodriguez     Tallahassee       (Virgil Suarez)
Abuelo’s Dreams

The wives and women gathered in the kitchen,
the island full of foods from home, a night

of nostalgia. Fricase de pollo, arroz, platanitos,
But Cuba was decades away no matter 

the distance, and the men’s cigar smoke lingered
in the kitchen, caressing the food with flirtatious 

touch, although the smoke played dominoes
with the men in starched guayaberas

on the veranda, it snuck through the small
gaps in windowsills or through the opening

and closing of the doors, as the wives checked in 
on their husbands incessantly. My job was to bring

Abuelos’s cafecito y croquetas to our company
but I knew better, I was an arbiter between

two worlds, many moons, and waves away
from one another.   Where the kitchen was talk

of life in Los Estados, where my Abuelita and 
the wives gossiped about who wore what to church.

While outside the men spoke in loud voices
about La Revolucion and plotting the ways Castro

might die, how the regime may one day end,
when they could return to the white beaches of 

Varadero or to their medical practices 
left to the government or desolate in Habana. 

I walked slowly with a large silver platter adorned
with small coffee cups painted with horrible yellow

polka dots and dark blue lining, a tray of croquetas
and sliced limes. The cigar smoke mixing

with the aroma of my innocence, Agua de Violetas
that I was spritzed in after every bath, like every

Cuban child I had met, another reminder
of home that followed us without consent.

The platter fell from my small, slippery hands inches
from the table. Café crashing, tazas in smithereens,

the food birds in short flights down to the 
terracotta tile. My lips wavered, face and ears 

grew hot, and the salt began to flow from my 
eyes. My grandfather pulled me onto his lap, 

his arthritic fingers bent this way and that.
He smiled, chuckled almost at the scene.

He looked me in the eye:  Life is but an empty dream
and then you die.  A saying he believed he learned

from Longfellow, misusing and mispronouncing
often but this was his attempt to merge the worlds

together; to  bring the world in the veranda and stitch
it to that of the kitchen, with his broken English.

I was scolded by my grandmother, in her perfect
dress, her hair curled in all the right directions, 

she lectured me: how I had to be a lady, that things
must be done with grace and tact; how I had grown

fat since just this morning. My abuelo looked up and said,
Dale suave, Mimi. She glared at him, reminded him 

Yo soy la que mando aqui.  That night, Cuba didn’t
 seem so many decades, or stars, or waves away.