Have You Been Long Enough at Table Quotes

“Para los balseros

There is no country
where the dead don't float.
Men and children going,
having gone, lungwet
across thickened water.
Be it the body to know
what's missing. To call
back the colors. At sea
the stomach is a bugle
though I've heard it
called a scream.
Oil drums headless
as monarchs, styrofoam
on the knees. Said of
regimes: under or over.
Here or there.
The orchids are lovely
this time of year
and the women, writing.
What covers the land
and is the land-
much in us still.”
― Leslie Sainz, Have You Been Long Enough at Table

“Remedios
Para Mamacita
When G-d was a boy the dirt was dark red
and the myths of women, explicit.
Just enough of the world had been distributed
to know what was possible-what you didn't,
couldn't, have. Love hid in the kernels
of handsome mamey fruit. We sorted
through piles of black beans in case they lied
about its whereabouts, we built ladders
we were too tired to climb. We cried.
Eventually, we cried so often we were forced
to invent salvation. We'd fill the largest bucket
we could find with the coldest water. We'd
sit the crier down and crowd behind her.
After several synchronized breaths, we'd lift
the bucket and tip it downward. What was left
no longer resembled crying, but we chanted
come back, come back to us, anyway.”
― Leslie Sainz, Have You Been Long Enough at Table

“A Story of Love and Faith/La Milagrosa

Near-prayer and not. Pink, red flowers, orange and yellow
flowers and white. In this very moment, for different reasons,
this is as specific as I can be in both languages.
Day of the Holy Cross-she dies, feminely,
on Dia de la Cruz. Exactly who performs the miracle?
The dead and buried son shimmers to his mother's
dead and buried breast to suckle. Miracle. Thinking of
Archimedes's bathwater, the Cuban sculptor gives her
density, porelessness, in 20th-century Carrara. Exactly.
It is true statues are cruel when they're not. On the edge
of my cowardice, reason. Who exactly could call me
by name in that cemetery? Gladiolus, ginger, lilies. Young
women are a series of images. We are regimes.”
― Leslie Sainz, Have You Been Long Enough at Table

“Sonnet for Elegua

In pursuit of an ending, I quickened my pace. I had no questions, not my own, to recover in. The only certainty: the evening
under the oil palm when you gave me my dry feet.
From then on, dreams as warm as atoms. The exiled boy, always desperate to be heard, appeared mostly as crickets and hinges.
Three summers ago, he mutilated a pigeon by hurling it against the wall of a market.
It made sounds like the latch rattle of an icebox and the stain never came out,
even when we used aguardiente. I've left
my outline in worse places. Lately, by the window, where I count the women with thicker, blacker hair, study the way it tightens around their shoulders like bulls ascending.
What occupies me is also running.
It never tires, but rather, repositions itself.
I should like to reposition myself, please. All of me this time.”
― Leslie Sainz, Have You Been Long Enough at Table

“Sonnet for Shango
Orisha of lightning, virility, drumming, and war

THE WOMAN who raised the woman who raised me was
a mistress.
She met her lover at the tops of trees, screamed so loud
her tongue shoveled the sky. I don’t ask for as much.
I know there are better silences than my face in my hands,
you at your nearest. Still, hold me as a king would.
Madden me. They did not call me Maria
because even as an infant it was clear I could not abstain.
Before striking a neighboring town, lightning looks
both ways. December falls like sheet music,
like eyelashes, and again men sharpen themselves
in your name. Bastion. Frenzy. The same blood spilling.
Before you leave, I store half of me in the batea and the rest
at the nape of your neck. Fire. Each of your fingers.
No, there is nothing more generous, more just.”
― Leslie Sainz, Have You Been Long Enough at Table

“Sonnet for Yemaya
Orisha of the living ocean, and the divine feminine

MOTHER, I am not married but I give,
am giving, fullness. Am conjuring.
Egret in flight. Scent of powder, sea foam.
The cowry shells speak but not of their past;
first abandonment, a turning over.
Then, snail exposed to air, all cruelties.
Mother, help me not fear comparison.
So much depends on this globe you’ve painted
brown, soil of the trout lily, body
in diapause. In your sea of nature
and harmony, I want to live. Be live
as commodity, the satchel of stones
I leave in the corners I make holy.
Only the act of making is assured.”
― Leslie Sainz, Have You Been Long Enough at Table

“Mal de Ojo

I study her hip bones, midday.
Something crackles through the trees—no, a withering.

I let the last malanga rot on the counter because it is easier
not to have to cut another thing open.

Bulls in my blood, pawing. The winter of it all.

Days later, I make another woman my enemy.
I follow her for three blocks before I trip over my envy,

forget to lessen myself. When I hit the sidewalk,
I feel my mother fall in Florida, and her mother, the same.

But I am smaller now than I was then.
Please, do not ask about my thens.”
― Leslie Sainz, Have You Been Long Enough at Table

“Sonnet for Ochún

After my left arm I washed my right, neck, décolletage,
and navel. I ate ground meat with large crystals of imported salt.
The women and men who would stroke my hair if I asked,
I thought of them fondly then sadly. At the flea market,
what I touched with a fingernail was a copper lamp, a mundane
painting of mountains, the cashier’s hum. I bought nothing I didn’t
want. In the cul-de-sac, I found clouds on leashes, loose roosters.
I thought thoughts ugly as clothespins. Reading a used book,
I suspected I knew less about death than the last person who held it.
I spat into a mirrored sink. I lost my slippers and face. To feel more
like water, I drank it. Before bed, I walked my plank of uncertainties
and plunged further into uncertainty. Am I capturing all of history
in this gesture? I shouted into the future. In the wet air of the future,
I could have but never appeared. No one was sorry but me.”
― Leslie Sainz, Have You Been Long Enough at Table

“Notice to Appear

It goes doorbell
(two beats)
then knocking
(three or more beats)
or knocking
(five beats)
then doorbell (three times,
two beats each).
The very first beat disappears
the front door.
We abrupt.
We.
Any way possible, silence.
Beat beat
then beat beat beat beat.
We crawl to Mother
and Father’s closet
staying close
to the grout.
Together we have
four pairs of legs.
I am short and young
enough already
not to be seen
and Brother is taller and
growing. Beat beat beat
beat beat beat beat
beat beat beat beat.
Our hearts (four)
are summoned into this
beating, so the sound of
heavy listening
(Mother heavy listens best).
Our hearts (four)
are so impressionable, our ears
(eight) are so airless
and impressionable.
Beat beat.
In the closet we crouch
on top of each other
(Father’s disappearance
that close) and look
like more legs.
Beat beat
beat beat
beat.
The house black and whites.
Brother and I heavy
listen to Mother looking at Father
as though he is
her husband only.
Our impressionable hearts
(two),
our airless ears
(four).
Beat
beat
beat
beat
beat
beat
beat
beat
beat
beat
beat.
On the property’s
perimeter,
legs
(two)
with large feet in boots
on the patio.
That sound.
That close.”
― Leslie Sainz, Have You Been Long Enough at Table