Page 76 - WTP VOl.VII#5

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Inheritance
Fresh off the Freedom Flights from Havana,
my father, fifteen and hungry, ground copper against concrete, shaved pennies into dimes, fooled the cigarette machines at Jackson Sr. High into putting out packs of Camels he’d unload
at lunch, just enough for a carton
of Carnation milk, or a juicy Red Delicious.
He never forgot poverty’s rumble, how it careened through the cavern of his abdomen, hunger
a rubber mallet thudding against his ribcage
as he scraped away scraps of food defiled
by ash and butts on the graveyard shift at Wolfies, where his boss, Buddy,
never let him sample the blue plate specials
he could not afford to buy, his tips dependent
on blonde waiters who called him wetback
and slipped him less than 10 percent. There
he learned to love the heft of coins, amassed
a legacy in jars: Krugerrands, doubloons, real silver dollars we dig up now, eager to cash in on the sum of his fear, keep it close, just in case.
What You Called To Say At Lunch
Your message spoke of a lost species
so old it had grown new again. Great apes
that ruled Ethiopia ten million years ago,
terrible teeth giving pause to science,
things we thought we knew about origins and limits. I understood then why it took so long to find you, why it took years to sort through variables,
identify the longing, harness it into tools
I needed to break it all down, fossils giving way
to answers, like the bones of that gorilla,
buried for eons, glorious, finally found.
Caridad Moro-Gronlier