Not women, yet. Girls.
So, no. El Cero is not the kind of hustler Papi was.
He has no code.
The sweat that makes his money is not his own.
Even now, as I stare at the setting sun & walk away,
he calls out, “Camino, you know, I’m here for you.
Whatever you need. Some extra money, or a shoulder
to cry on. Just let me know. Your father’s life, it’s such a loss.”
It is a warm evening. But my skin feels kissed by cold.
Whatever Papi was paying him each year I think El Cero
is still expecting. Even though I don’t have a dime
to my name. I know there are other ways he’d accept payment.
I know he would love nothing more
than to have me further
in his debt.
I know what El Cero sees when he looks at me:
This hair, the curls down my back,
lightened by sun & always tangled.
This thin body, better fed than most, curved softly
in the places that elicit dog whistles & piropos; swimming
has kept this body honed like Tía’s oft-sharpened machete.
I am pointy angles: knees & elbows,
sharp cheekbones & jaw, jagged tongue—
although the last is not the water’s fault.
My skin is the same color as Tía’s, as Mamá’s.
If Papi’s photo was shot in black & white,
I would be cast in soft sepia: shades of golden brown.
I am a girl who does not look like a woman.
I am a girl who looks like a girl.
I am a girl who is not full-fledged yet.
& that’s exactly what El Cero counts on.
A girl, easy to convince into a trade she doesn’t want,
easy to sell to the men who do.
I used to go to school with El Cero’s little sister.
Back then he wasn’t El Cero yet. He was just
skinny Alejandro, Emily’s older brother.
Back before the fever that swept in with a hurricane.
Back before the deaths, the illness.
Back before Papi put me in private school. Back before it all.
Cero’s little sister had a big gap-toothed smile,
a gap that wasn’t just because we were both seven
& missing teeth.
Cero’s little sister was my friend.
The first to raise her hand in class, to volunteer
to read out loud. She waved at everyone & everything:
the pregnant gutter cats, the women
who sold ointments & socks, the drunkards on the
corner singing off-key.
The dengue fever came with the rain.
Tía didn’t have enough hands to try to heal them all.
Not even her own stubborn sister who said she was fine.
Not the little girl who was her niece’s
good friend. There were lots of funerals
that October. Rumor is, after Cero’s sister died
he was never the same. Before I learned to fear him,
there was one memory that kept coming back,
the one I cannot shake even as I shake when he approaches:
Cero has never appeared young to me. Always this same
age, this same face. But he would come to school
to pick Emily up. & she would stop
everything she was doing & run to him, arms spread wide.
He would catch her, swinging her in circles. & I was jealous.
Jealous I didn’t have a consistent male figure like Cero in my life.
Tía has kept the TV on since the accident.
She hasn’t blown out the three big candles
under a picture of my father
on the ancestral altar.
This morning, divers began
pulling up pieces of the plane.
Papi loved the water, could hold his breath
longer than anyone. The news coverage has died down;
they say any chance of survivors has too.
It’s been seventy-two hours, & I go to school on Monday
even though Tía tells me I should stay home. I want normal.
But my teachers do not ask me for homework, do not ask me questions.
In the afternoon, El Cero sits on a crate
near where my bus drops me off. Later he is outside the
bar I have to walk past to get to the beach.
I try not to dread that he seems to appear on every corner.
But it feels like El Cero has sullied any sense of safety.
& since most of his dealings happen at the resort next door,
I know that he won’t be leaving me or this sand alone;
like a too-skinny cat who knows you hold scraps
in one hand & a smack in the other, I give him a wide berth.
For dinner, I warm the days-old stew that I still can’t stomach.
At this point, we have no reason to hope but I can’t say the words
because then it will become real.
Tía & I both act
like not talking about it
will make it not true.
I help her grind & dry
herbs. We mend towels
& watch TV quietly.
Once or twice when I walk
into the living room, I hear her
murmuring on the phone;
she’s always quick to hang up;
I think she’s been making
funeral arrangements
but knows she can’t tell me. Knows
my shoulders are too narrow
to bear that news just yet.
Camino Yahaira
Some people play chess, but I played chess.
Not like your abuelito at the park plays chess.
No offense to anybody’s grandfather. It’s just,
my ranking’s more official than your abuelito’s.
Last year my FIDE ranking was higher
than the year I was born, well over the 2000s.
I scrubbed kids weekly at citywide competitions
& was on a travel team for national tournaments.
Until last year.
I’m not the best student at A. C. Portalatín High School,
but I was one of the best chess players in the entire city.
& I ensured our team won titles,
& the school loved me for it; so did the neighborhood.
I got us into the newspapers & on late-night TV
for something other than drugs or poor test scores or gentrification.
But last year, things changed. & so did I.
So did chess. & if the game taught me one thing,
it’s once you lift a pawn off the board,
you have to move it forward. It cannot return where it was.
Papi was a good chess teacher.
He was not a good chess player.
Evidenced by how terribly he hid things.
You could always tell his next play.
At least, that’s what I used to think.
When Papi is in DR we do not speak often,
but I never had to reach him
the way I did one day last summer.
It felt like he might be
the only person to help me make sense
of The Thing That Happened.
The thing I still find hard to talk about.
I called his cell. He didn’t answer.
I sent him a text, & no response.
I tried his email, but one day later
my inbox was still empty.
I realized Papi always travels for negocios,
but I didn’t have a single work number.
I called Tío Jorge to ask, but he