by Bruce Willard

If I was born here, mid-century,
between sun-blistered walls,
after the war and chill layers
of excess that became the heat of hope,
if I was here when the sun rose
from the white star of the night,
when the viscous smell of bananas
and burnt sugar lifts from rain-glazed streets
to iron balconies with their nests
of wires and birds of cracked plaster,
I would still be six.

Six with the sleeping dogs,
in their doorways of burnished wood
and stairs that turn six times,
one for each decade since the Revolution.

Six at first light when the breeze
remembers the day before,
and the Caribbean, salty,
reconstitutes itself from clouds.

Six with the birds of San Juan de Dias
sleeping in the jacaranda trees,
waiting for the sun
to open purple blooms.

Six with the chime of the wall clock
across Calle Emperdrado with its produce
market and dance hall and Chevy BelAirs
that transport riders forward and back.

Six with the dogs of Parque Centrale
scratching their bristly necks, licking
the balls of the day, homeless
and confident, with a nose for memory.

Nelson, videographer at the FAC gallery,
shows a 109-minute film that advances and retreats.
Its soundtrack is the Cuban National Anthem—
3 minutes, 20 seconds of triumph—
stretched the length of its screening,
voice rumbling like a volcano, seismic,
demanding to be heard again.

It’s what makes us feel
like we’re traveling forward by looking back
that moves us to conscience.
Face to the wind, bow to the tide or current,
we ferry across the surge.

If we are lucky, we survive
the flood into which we were born.
I am six—a half a life in dog’s years.
We are sixty-six and there is no change.
We are made by what we re-live.
Revolutions. No beginning. No end.

by Bruce Willard

How typical of me to suggest a wedding
reception on the Green River,
deep in the canyonlands of Utah,
that big, rolling, chocolate river in May
so opaque you couldn’t see 6 inches
through its body to the rock of which it’s made.

At the ceremony under Double Arch
a chipmunk ran across your sneakers.
The mayor who conducted our small recital
left us scrambling for parts, drowning
in a murky stream of words.
Somewhere in the desert our cake melted.

It was the beginning of your third trimester
and you floated in an innertube between rafts,
Bob with his floating cask of tequila,
our kids by prior marriages wide-eyed,
blindsided by irreverence.
Everything looked like a penis to Julio.

We laughed 5 straight days,
and when we stopped, we scrubbed the dirt
from our skin and carried the residue
in our shoes and bags for generations
to re-discover. I wanted its durability,

how it transported what was worn, scraped away, lost
to someplace new. I think it was that dirt
that traveled all the way from the Great Salt Lake
that kept us together. That stuck
between the plastic sleeves of photos
and held together our album of years.

How I’ve come to love that grit. The primordial
feeling of place on the move.
That attaches to everything living
and dead. That carries what’s loose,
mixed and messy downstream
to what it becomes.

by Bruce Willard

You wouldn’t believe the moonlight,
how it spreads loud as a slick over the bay.

Seems like the whole world
has something to say.

A late party in a punt
crosses the harbor for home.

Two couples, back from the brink,
navigate the rocks and ledges.

Listen to the wake their voices make
as they cut through the viscous night

illuminating what’s dark
and difficult to see.

by Myronn Hardy

There was no banter of palms
but I saw them beckoning above us.
Beckoning as snow fell outside.
I have lived in the place
that churned you
into the world.
Welcome to mine.
Yet I’m uneasy here.
You’ve learned some
of its unremitting tragedy
despite its gloss     its perpetual
dream.  I don’t know how to relearn
an untruth.
I refuse to lie.