Mark Cox
Rosa De Cuba
In 1933 Havana,
The only Cubans are waiters,
Even they over-act,
And the heavy’s elongated shadow
Nearly topples the flimsy film set wall.
There is, though, a long draw of smoke
Exhaled into slinky evening wear,
A fire on the fifth floor named Natassia,
A nurse in whites up to the hilt in your eye,
And Georgette, the girl-next-door
Voted most likely to be suckered,
Thrust into danger, debauchery
And other standardized tests
Of her prim American character.
After living in Utah, even the most mundane
Hotel lobby announcement sounds
Like Churchill Downs on the radio. So, just imagine
Here in Havana, an orchestra swaying in rum,
The palm trees spread-eagled
For a strong-jawed coupe-de-ville,
An underage pineapple embedded in its grill.
This is not your daddy’s hayloft or truck bed
Roseate in the pre-nuclear glow
Of pollen and wheat chaff—
This is one sexy Errol Flynn of a machine
Arcing headfirst from pier into low-tide
And the complimentary turn-down service
Of Marina del Mundo,
#10 Spanish Broadway
At Broken Spirit Boulevard.
Just 90 miles from her morals,
She is fully abandoned now, breathless
In the constrictions of his cummerbund,
Sucking on a boutonnière, champagne
Foaming from her most private places,
A cigar band laminated by semen to her thigh,
Which is, of course, when the flashbulb of her mother
Incandesces at the window sill,
And she wakes, raises her ink-smeared cheek
From the late edition,
Wakes, in short, to vintage disgrace,
And another story, She knows,
She won’t tell the grandkids,
While her freighter of hymns steams
Around the corner past Schwab’s,
Its course plotted home,
Happily ever after,
To play the role of a lifetime
At the Great Salt Lake.
Bio
Mark Cox teaches in the Creative Writing Department at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington and in the Vermont College MFA Program. His books are Smoulder (David R. Godine), and Natural Causes and Thirty-seven Years from the Stone, both published in the Pitt Poetry Series.