Madrugada
Mamá died before sunrise this morning. I find myself driving through Bayshore Boulevard, one of my favorites, after an early flight from Connecticut to visit her. Seventy-five degrees. Sunny. Cool for Tampa. I sip a cortadito, dark with a hint of steamed milk. To my left, mansions with water views. The newer ones, almost entirely of glass. The historic ones, Spanish-style homes for non-Spanish speakers, don clay roof tiles the color of Mamá’s hair the year she darkened it. No signs of aging. In Colombia, architecture was always Spanish-style, even the boarding school Mamá attended—open courtyards, orchids, macaws. How fitting, that after retirement, she and Papá left New York for this area. Runners dot the four-and-a-half-mile walkway that borders the bay. A woman with a stroller checks on her baby. Manatees and dolphins spy passersby. Locals never cancel plans, even when it’s raining. Sun doesn’t lag far behind. I’m headed to some funeral home—a place selected by an LPN. My sister was told about it when she stopped by the nursing home on her way to work. Mamá’s body was already gone.
seagulls drift
over concrete railing
a fisherman casts his line
She Begins
the day with
light through drawn gauze
curtains she wishes were slats were
coffee were brown like
her skin grips her husband’s
hand folded under her
pillow clenched like the child
they couldn’t conceive she begins
a shudder a rawness a prayer
a feign of forgiveness a memory she
can’t summon or shake a windstorm
of tripped words of gull squawks
of every morning
breathe focus breathe past the quick
sand pill bugs a yearn for your mother
years dead hold on to the blue
sheets your husband’s
breath on your arm the shaking
will stop the shaking
Luisa Caycedo-Kimura is a Colombian-born writer, translator, and educator. Her honors include a John K. Walsh Residency Fellowship at the Anderson Center at Tower View, an Adrienne Reiner Hochstadt Fellowship at Ragdale, and a Robert Pinsky Global Fellowship in Poetry. Her work has also been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. A former attorney, Luisa left the legal profession to pursue her passion for writing. She holds an MFA from Boston University. Luisa’s poems appear or are forthcoming in The Cincinnati Review, Sunken Garden Poetry 1992-2011, RHINO, Diode, Shenandoah, Mid-American Review, Nashville Review, and elsewhere.