At times I think I am the Mariana Trench,
a place once thought empty
because life shouldn’t survive in a sunless place.
But of course, it is the horrific
creatures that thrive here. The ones
with poisonous tentacles,
and gnarled faces, and no names,
except for the most notorious.
One scientific team in 1985
spent three hours wrestling
with the line of their underwater research craft.
When their mangled vessel saw the light of day again
one of its scars held the tooth of a Megalodon.
The team lied in their reports,
for fear their revelation might be true.
Scientists say if Megalodon
or any of the trench’s inhabitants
were forced to the surface
they would turn into bombs,
exploding before they ever saw the sun,
and cause incalculable ecological damage.
So long as we resist the urge
to plumb the depths, we are, supposedly,
safe from the horrors long thought extinct.
No, I am not so understood
as a fact of science. I am
a historical matter, subject to interpretation.
I am the 26th of July,
a day when Fidel and Company
failed to take the Moncada Barracks,
and were arrested
and, possibly, won the revolution when Fidel
martyred himself as Bautista’s prisoner.
Ask ten historians about the twenty sixth of July,
and you will get thirty-six answers
about politics and perspectives
and questions that exacerbate your questions
and you will question the definitions of words
like “revolution” and “victory” and “freedom.”
Some say Cuba won its freedom that day,
but if a machete and a bayonet can both
kill you, is one better than the other?
A bayonet has one purpose, to slice
through a heart, but a machete wears
the camouflage of utility
while the sugar canes cheer
and clear a path for him to roll into their capital.
No, that’s too grand
for me. I am stagnant and translucent
and I do not warrant this much scrutiny.
I am a town in Montana full
of empty Mexican restaurants and lacking any culture
besides a poverty of motivation,
where the sun blinds from its place in the sky,
and threatens to melt the ranchers
through the holes in their moth-eaten jackets,
and all signs of modernity
seem transported from a future of abundance
that will come soon, but not soon enough.
The land is hungry here, threatening
with every step to swallow
the town’s inhabitants
in hopes vegetation will live again
without the help of alien chemicals.
The land throws animal waste
into the water in desperation, but the bodies
humanity returns are inedible, tasting of
disappointment and formaldehyde.
The living people here trade hollow smiles
at the drive through window
and niceties in the firearms section
of the Walmart. All Walmarts
look the same but nobody here knows that for a fact
because they’ve only known one town’s Walmart
because they’ve only know one town.
Nobody has a heroic journey story here.
Nobody remembers how they arrived here.
Nobody is from here, but all anyone remembers is this town.