Maracas

                              for Alejandrina 

From calabash came the maracas 
that glacé this Cuban cha-cha-chá 

tumbling into our ears again. 
The genealogy of sugarcane 

can be traced from Batista to Castro, 
through malta and guarapo, 

the many zafras you tossed billets over 
your shoulders, their faint, grassy odor 

sticking to your shirt by nightfall. 
There were no combines to overhaul 

the shoot tips; machetes struck the roots 
as if cucarachas in a rumba. 

The armband marked you like an accent. 
“Sometimes,” you told me, “my parents 

mailed me cans of leche condensada. 
I liked to eat it with ice.” Sugar consolidated 

your fieldwork, those years of labor 
stitched together in your memory 

by this disaccharide, its line-bond structure 
like a series of Cassiopeias that measure 

survival in terms of its punishments. 
I hear them now—the instruments 

we pluck from trees, guaracha’s crop 
that once satiated Valdés, Leyva, Cruz. 

They riff with your hips as you coax 
caramel to a simmer on the stove, 

the anthers of son cubano. 
Shocked gourds. Handheld onomatopoeias.