Katherine Sánchez Espano

Katherine Sánchez Espano’s book of poetry, The Sky’s Dustbin, was published by The Bitter Oleander Press in 2015. In addition to publishing poems in numerous journals such as The Massachusetts Review, The Bitter Oleander, Green Mountains Review, The Spoon River Poetry Review, Sycamore Review, and Lullwater Review, her poetry has been anthologized in American Diaspora: Poetry of Displacement and Like Thunder: Poets Respond to Violence in America. She received a Florida Artist Enhancement Grant, was a semi-finalist in the Discovery/The Nation poetry contest, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Florida and a BA in Creative Writing from Carnegie Mellon University. She lives in Saint Johns, FL where she owns a portrait photography business and teaches writing.

THE EMIGRANT

I am the boy, stomach flat on sand.

I reach under the barbed wire fence

for homeland dirt. The soldier’s boot

smoothes the wrinkles on my hand like an iron.

I am the child, jumping

on the new leather sofa.

I laugh at the poster

on the living room wall of the boy

touching homeland dirt.

I am the man, watching the child.

The money is gone. My teeth

burden my mouth like chiseled

gravestones. My tongue

is a dried rose. If I speak,

it will crumble.

I am the homeland.

Your family sings

in my quicksand.

THE HOUSE IN THE SLIDE VIEWER

Here is the marble shower

(Batista’s wife envied),

each tile a smug tiara.

Notice the posed goblets

on the table’s ballroom

(a suspended waltz),

the diplomacy of napkins

hiding darkened folds,

the plates white as the Granma yacht

(ready to end an era),

the forks like pointed rifles.

Ah, the elegance of a bride

and the house she must leave,

a corpse groom fit only

for final portraits.

The streets swelled with commoners

like champagne corks for Castro.

Behind the lens, could my distant cousin

foresee her fate as a Miami cashier?

That day, a mile from her house in Cuba,

a naked child with skin laced in dust

chewed a guava’s stem

until his gums bled.

GIVING

My father gave up

the tree in Cuba that rolled its coconuts like dice,

the road to his grandparents’ farm

where chickens scratched symphonies in dirt,

the espresso cup cloud on the table of sky,

the men who played dominoes at low tide,

the sugarcane rows stretched like rosary beads.

He gave me

Florida mangrove roots knitted in swamps,

the wing of curtain rising over an open window,

the drafting table I played under

with blueprints spread like a heaven,

the fidelity of a boat taken for granted,

the rescue realized later,

the time to see the white of sails

unfurling in his hair.