The Rivers Are Inside Our Homes (eBook, EPUB)

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.

I.

Trilocation

February Fifteenth MDCCCXCVIII

Necropolis

To Make a Balsa Because You Have To

Hurricane Advice from Your Sister

Guardian

Andrew

Wishing Game

Migration

A Short Journey

CSS Stonewall Stationed in Havana Harbor

On Both Sides, Water

Che in Technicolor

Cuba, Boasted Rival of Swiss Chocolate

Go to the Smallest Room Right Now

Mothers’ Warnings

II.

Rupture, Alternating

Las Princesas Bailarinas

María Antonia

Homemaking

Tintagel

Caretaker

A Liking, Somewhat

On a Husband’s Next Family

Hot Season

Emergency

If the Water is Hot and Does Not Warm You

Maiden Without Hands in the Exile

III.

Key to the Indies

Camelot

Cajas de Muerto

Superpowered

A Ruler is Poseidon

The Pirate

How Can You Make a Communist Flower?

Diagnosis in Exile

Metamorphism

And for the Head, a Crown

Antilles Formation

The Rivers Are Inside Our Home

Shelter in Place

Havana Syndrome

Trump Meeting Kim Jong-Un

Abuelas

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.