love, eddie

Stiff hammocks with asymmetrical patterns
Beaten down by weather
Rock with the elegance of old sneakers on telephone lines
Or dirty streams of toilet paper flapping from tree branches
We pledged a myriad of dreams on those battered things
Disintegrating in the backyard of my father
He, too lazy to take them down
Or do anything
Some things don’t change

The old man spells my name “Vicktor”
Looks more like “Xecten” in cursive, when he tries
Calls me “Juan”, his brothers name
Who owes him 10 dollars
Says he’s glad his wife left him
Though he’s had none
And waits for his dead mother to come home
She has to cook those plantains
for his first day of school tomorrow

In the back yard where we mapped our futures in blue chalk
on the large patio steps
Are a collection of ashy patches and those dull yellow weeds
I mistook for baby daffodils
Until you convinced me to make a bouquet of them for Luz
Who called me bruto and then left me

The crooked tree you tried to climb but fell
Because you wore chancletas instead of sneakers
Is still there, bearing no sign of the initials we never carved
Into it, but promised to
I held my ear to the trunk
Near the big hole where squirrels escaped to, sometimes rats,
With bits of food or tire, now empty
I listened for the echo of my voice when I spoke into it
When out came the hush of our childhood conversations
About the girls we thought we’d marry, & the girls we’d make our mistresses
The feasts we’d share with kings and gangsters
The countries we’d conquer with my father’s big machete,
You carried in your belt, calling yourself Don Quixote
Swatting and stabbing the trail of my costume,
The long brown dress of my grandmother you convinced me
To wear, saying, I had the shoulders of a stallion
And would make a handsome caballo

There were the unfinished Corona bottles
We stole from my father’s sleepy hands
And quarter potato chip bags we ate
Instead of dinner
The winter nights we swung from those hammocks,
The only things my father ever brought from the island
The scent of Cuba in every strand of rope
Each knot a fist from someone he left behind
Waiting for freedom
You said you did not mind the cold those evenings
Wrapped in nothing but our sweatshirts and blue jeans
Said you found the full view
Of sky muy chevere though I knew
It was your own father
You did not want to go home to
His hands as big as the beaches he sang for
Those hands that shattered the teeth and bones
Of every child who carried his name

I didn’t believe you when you said
You were running away to Miami
But by the time your birthday came
I gave up on waiting for your return
On the day you would have turned 12
I picked as many yellow weeds
And laid them on the hammock
Beneath it were the 6 rocks
You spent months trying to break open
Hoping to find jewels you would give
To the mothers we never met
I cried for the first time that night
Salty drops falling into one of my father’s beers
That sour taste i never learned to like,
Made more bitter with the ache of the heart
I pretended wasn’t broken

There were no stars out when I wrote these words
No soft winds, no prospect of hope in the light of a passing firefly
Just the ugly backyard where the soles of our feet stood side by side
As friends with the same dreams
The old man swears in the patch of dry weeds that has grown in the soil
Since we last stood there
Are two brothers sleeping in a garden of diamonds