It is night on my island, and in the calm
after the shouts and songs of what’s for sale
the yellow rectangles in the tall apartment buildings
disappear one by one.
The people walking the bay in twos and threes and fours, pushing their strollers, talking into the air, walking their dogs, kissing their lovers, are slowly going home, to leave the bay to count its pace in a slow sleeping breath like a mother who sleeps lightly, waiting for her children to come home.
The children leave the island for the city center, on buses and in taxis,
for the hip-bumping rum-downing scenes of downtown.
I could be out there, too. After all, as my mother says,
La juventud es pa’ divertirse. Vete bailaindo y tomando, nena. But I don’t go;
I am trying to write my poem.
In my house, the lightbulbs sing a buzzing wait
for the sons who will be out until five in the morning.
Marina Weiss has been published or will be published in Boston Review, Circus, and Timothy McSweeney's Internet Tendency. She is the recipient of the Academy of American Poets' University Prize and a Fulbright grant. She's read poetry for Dominic Luxford at The Believer, and I've had the good fortune of working with Terrance Hayes, Daniel Hall, and the late Craig Arnold.