The Rivers Are Inside Our Homes

By Victoria María Castells

The Rivers Are Inside Our Homes handles themes of loss and exile, aging generations, fable and fairy tale, marriage and hurt, with the island of Cuba at its heart.

These incandescent poems by Cuban American poet Victoria María Castells explore how we can salvage our notion of paradise in an overspent Eden. In thwarted homes located in Havana and Miami, Rapunzel and her prince, persecuted nymphs, Morgause, and Bluebeard’s wife speak to us directly, all in need of returning to safety. Confronting machismo, illness, heartbreak, and isolation, the poems depict how women are at the mercy of men, either husband or oligarch. Yet all generations of Cubans are bombarded with this need to return or to leave, to have both, to have neither.

Meanwhile, hurricane seasons add further instability to shelter and family, growing fiercer every year. Exile and displacement are accepted as permanent conditions. Latin America will mirror Cuba’s violent struggles as conquered land and despotic object. From the colonial desecrations to fraught revolutionary aftermath, the search for home is lyrically charted by this contradictory land of suffering and dreams. Through these poems, dictators, grandmothers, mythical characters, and buccaneers are given voices of equal strength, challenging what constitutes truth under a prism of fantasy and desire.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Release date: Aug 1, 2023
• ISBN: 9780268205652

Victoria María Castells

Victoria María Castells is a creative writing teacher in Miami, Florida. Her poems have appeared in Reservoir, The Journal, Quarter After Eight, Notre Dame Review, and other literary journals.

Book preview

Trilocation

Planetary Communistic Infamy:

the Cuban young

flourishing the moon farms,

as if guavas were a common itch

and the stars themselves

could speak like

Leninists. NASA would be sent

manifestos.

A lunar backup plan, having taken

the Castros under an ensured

corpsedness and expelled under

galactic seal, this skin too misspent

to purify under chicken bones

and praying, ultra-zombi

remains in search of a malleable

galaxy where all of it could work again.

The rest pushing on through dust and

globe, the planetary rover now a

taxicab, el comunismo rooting the

stars and dreams of eating ice giants

like granizados bought

on the street.

Dejando atrás, a dream and memory,

the memory a dream and the dream

memorized to tell the Miami-like

children you have too now, further

hijos de exilio—to say to them,

no more of these Atlantic centuries,

that dirt-on-water overgrowth,

Caribbean seabed risen to air;

we are the moon as it runs out.

And for that other land we declaim against,

an asteroid pushed from terrestrial pit:

only deadly mental perfection,

the nostalgia of island on earth.

February Fifteenth MDCCCXCVIII

My hold on Cuba is

spiritualist, like the US Navy

on the battleship Maine,

bones buried and honored

in the Cementerio de Cristóbal Colón;

trying to learn what it means to be

Cuban and dead for one year;

before taken back, Arlington-

assimilated, American bound,

and forever to speak in Spanish

because they learned

how to be Cuban,

more Cuban than me:

dead in Havana for one year,

and I living for none.

But if I could ask if you still

know of the others, their cells

drifting across the bay in contrast

to your bones, comrades unclaimed,

disinterred, tunneled from

themselves in the Caribbean Sea,

to these others, say, you gave us our

freedom, it lasted fifty-six years—

You have doubled that in water.

If one could swim there

and feel them on the skin,

it would take all these years to forget it.

Necropolis

para mis abuelas

My love for you

is of the sarcophagi

of Havana;

sea-suppressant cases and corpses

buried inside the soil that still

tastes itself Communist. When