Month: April 2023

We are 
floating 
on
a very 
thin 
raft, 
myself included.

I am mostly 
talking 
about 
white people 
I know. 

Though 300,000 
Cubans 
crossed 
the border 
this year. 

Some 
on rafts, 
but mostly 
on foot. 

Poverty 
so extreme 
a family 
I became 
close to
insisted 
I purchase 
their teenage niece.

They cried 
when I said 
no. 

There is no 
way 
a functional 
human 
intelligence 
can grapple 
with 
the horrors 
of the twentieth century. 

The 21st 
century 
looks 
worse.

A person 
smarter
than me 
said
There is fire, 
water,
and the atomic bomb. 
We’ll see.

I wept 
when I saw
a photo 
of my mother 
riding 
her bike 
to school 
in the small
town 
of 
her birth.