Baby doll

Brazil alphabet

The Girl from Panama BY CLEMENS STARCK

The Girl from Panama

BY CLEMENS STARCK

I'm talking with Mike over coffee.

His wife recently left him. He's lonely.

We're both carpenters, a couple of old guys in baseball caps

plying the trade.

We can frame a wall and hang a door, we can

read a set of blueprints.

But when it comes to women . . .

 

I'm thinking about my mother, who is 91

and very frail. I'm thinking

about my wife, my daughters, my granddaughter,

my sister, old girlfriends, my ex-wife,

and the girl from Panama

in the reading room of the New Orleans public library

forty-five years ago

who slipped a note to me across the table, asking:

"Are you a philosophy?"

 

Rain splatters against the storefront

of the coffee shop. Mike and I are silent

for a long time

before going back to work.

 

Poem copyright ©2019 by Clemens Starck, "The Girl from Panama," from Cathedrals & Parking Lots: Collected Poems, (Empty Bowl Press, 2019). Poem reprinted by permission of Clemens Starck and the publisher.

Counting BY MARGARITA ENGLE

Counting

BY MARGARITA ENGLE

Harry Franck, from the United States of America - Census Enumerator

I came to Panama planning to dig

the Eighth Wonder of the World,

but I was told that white men

should never be seen working

with shovels, so I took a police job,

and now I've been transferred

to the census.

I roam the jungle, counting laborers

who live in shanties and those who live

on the run, fugitives who are too angry

to keep working for silver in a system

where they know that others

earn gold.

When islanders see me coming,

they're afraid of trouble, even though

I can't arrest them anymore—now

all I need is a record of their names, ages,

homelands, and colors.

The rules of this census confound me.

I'm expected to count white Jamaicans

as dark and every shade of Spaniard

as semi-white, so that Americans

can pretend

there's only one color

in each country.

How am I supposed to enumerate

this kid with the Cuban accent?

His skin is medium, but his eyes

are green.

And what about that Puerto Rican

scientist, who speaks like a New York

professor,

or the girl who says she doesn't know

where she was born or who her parents

are—she could be part native, or part French,

Jamaican, Chinese ...

She could even be part American,

from people who passed through here

way back

in gold rush days.

Counting feels just as impossible

as turning solid mountains

into a ditch.

Margarita Engle, "Counting (Harry Franck from the United States of America Census Enumerator)" from Silver People: Voices from the Panama Canal.  Copyright © 2014 by Margarita Engle.  Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Source: Silver People: Voices from the Panama Canal (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014)

Garden of forking paths

Borges infinity

Library of babel

La anaconda

South America bed places to visit

Mayan