. . . pongee-colored girls in white dresses the sun
shone through in multiple haloes
where they lay alongside streets like sofas
reading José Martí behind potted ferns
in avenue-knolls paved with Key West grass
and long-leaved tobacco shaved and scented like bark strips.
I dreamt a UCLA campus built by descendants of conquistadores:
Churriguerra architects and new-freed import-labor,
not the mystical-realism of material-less materialism in La Habana Vieja
in the hands of UNESCO-planners, waiting wanly
at the end of a totalitarian century breeding slaves
freed into nightmare-bondage to an Ever-Glorious Future.
—Anthony Kerrigan
