By the time Abuelo’s story

from so long ago reaches you,

it is swollen by the sea.

It has grown thickly-muscled

by swimming from Cuba, and staggering

up the beach on splayed planter’s feet.

It plays Candomblé at the end

of a working day in the cane,

and beseeches an Orixa

to season the village lovers,

one for another,

so that they may find each other

in the dark.

It swings a cane knife at night

when the shadow people come

to collect the women and children.

It uses a sickle’s whistling blade

to break open the plantation straw boss

on the day an old man dies

in the cane field furrows,

and the boss man bellows

“one nigger more, one nigger less.”

Abuelo’s story proclaims,

with cigar pitch and rum,

that the soil drinks

the boss man’s ink

in the peninsular heat,

and that the cane in that field

still grows darkly strange, strangely sweet