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The View from My Balcony
The corner of Animas and Campanario
Centro Habana, Cuba
Three boys shoot marbles on the sidewalk below
the laundry their mothers strung from one crumbling balcony
to the next. Each glass orb, glistening, bounces into the street
and underneath the ‘55 Buick Special, painted Tiffany Blue
over Bondo, and parked beside mounds of trash on the corner
where old men pick through the rubbish, seeking useful things
hidden in a sea of plastic bottles and rancid food. Things
like one aluminum can, just peeking out from below
soiled diapers and molded, rotten fruit—one crushed corner
of the can gleaming in the sunlight, just visible from my balcony
above. Two blocks up the road, the Malecón heralds the blue
Atlantic beyond, where a north wind blows down the street,
bringing with it dreams of Florida and another sun-drenched street
somewhere in the south of Miami. Alicia upstairs says that things
are better there. In Florida, the sky and the water are impossibly blue—
Madres, padres, and their familias, can escape out from below
the crumbling facades here that threaten to crush them. One balcony
fell last week and took the whole building with it, just around the corner
from here. Four cubanos muertos, Alicia tells me, on that corner,
but you wouldn’t know it after the rubble was swept from the street.
¿De donde eres? the cubanos, one after another, call up to my balcony,
and after my response, shout, ¡Americana! America, after all, a thing
they’ve imagined in a daydream more than once upon a time. Below,
a woman walks past to empty her trash into the pile beside this blue
building on this blue street in this blue town, under a sky of blue
that makes everything still somehow seem gray. I wonder if this corner
is the same as any other, but then remember Miramar, just west. Below
each building there, the view is not like this. On each manicured street,
freshly-pressed suits stroll from one embassy to the next. Everything
is planted and pruned and contorted into lies that echo off each balcony
here in no-man’s land, where Yessie sells cigarillos from her balcón
for thirty-five cents a pack, and cold cervezas in cans of green and blue
for only forty more. But these little luxuries are the bigger things
that most cubanos in Centro cannot afford. On every corner
up and down Campanario, the buildings close in on the calle,
and an invisible gray fog settles more each day on everyone below.Perched high on a Habana balcony, I miss the little things:
The boy in blue shoots pebbles of plaster into the street
from the corner of the curb, and there are no marbles below.
This Side of Negril
Down here at the West End
on Hylton Avenue is where
Wen fries snapper at his roadside stand
on Sundays. Red sauce too,
poured over rice and peas
with a side of slaw on top. I’ll
wait across the way at Whoopie’s and I’ll
save you a seat at the westernmost end
of the bar. Together, we’ll share each piece
while the sun sinks (the sky wears
his Sunday best) down, journeying on to
the Caymans, Belize, then Guatemala. Stands
of palms hold hammocks, and you’ll stand
at the edge of the cliff—the edge of this isle,
while I’ll snap just a picture or two
before the green flash that comes at the end
of the day. The Canadian ex-pat, Brian, wears
another Hawaiian shirt and breaks off a piece
of his gizzada—and another piece
for the goat that stands
nudging her nose at the pocket where
the bag used to be. I’ll
call Ardie over from the other end
of the bar, and order two
more. Red Stripe for you, and a white rum too,
with fresh-squeezed orange juice and a piece
of hand-chipped ice.
Back at East End
women in shanty-town stands
sell tchotchkes arranged in tightly-packed aisles
to American tourists come to ogle there,
just steps, but a world away from their
all-inclusive hells (women that wear too
much makeup and too much money).
I’ll
take my rice and peas and the peace
of the doctor birds that flit through stands
of ackee trees down here at the West End.
Before she closes tonight, you stop for a few pieces
of bacon, two potatoes, and four eggs from Dora’s stand.
We’ll fry it all in the morning for breakfast—at the West End.
Sarah Zietlow is from a small town in northeast Ohio where she currently teaches language arts to 7th-grade students. She holds a BA in Education from the University of Akron, an MA in English from Bowling Green State University, and is currently working on an MFA in Creative writing in the Bluegrass Writers Studio at Eastern Kentucky University. Sarah’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Adanna and Merion West. In her free time, Sarah enjoys sitting by campfires with her husband while simultaneously staring at the stars and contemplating how best to sell off all she owns in an effort to find herself in some place other than Cleveland.
THE CITY KEY 