Christopher Louis Romaguera
A Regla Prayer For Pops After Doctors Scare Him
Pops,
I pray for you at this most holy
church of your childhood.
That the nurse denying telehealth,
requesting you to appear for your test results,
is an idiot, robotic voice saying in person
reading lines like a pretentious deadpan actor
I pray that the world that has taken
so many of your homes,
doesn’t try to steal your final one,
while I’m in your original home
of La Habana,
I pray
that you don’t get the news,
that takes a home away from me,
the kind I may never get unlost from.
Hotel Comodoro
Your Abuelos met here, out in Miramar,
so many revolutions ago.
You share a cab with another Cuban
who has no interest in talking to gringos.
You get dropped off,
at the love-at-first-
sight bar, but the guards won’t
let you in. Security says you,
shouldn’t
be here. Hotel closed, no vacancy, no guests.
All of Cuba is under peer review,
but also they’re not your peers.
Peerless peers;
peering from above, through holes
in the walls, from the boats that
patrol, from the esquinas, from from from…
And the security guard says how sad it is,
that people like your abuelos left.
As if it was a decision made as casually, callously,
as leaving a friend’s drink off your bill.
and you see Security eying you,
as they toe, cross, set fire to the line,
as you add another line
to the tally of microaggressions
that you and yours have had to swallow,
long after the aggressive aggressions,
first started taking a toll on yours.
Dengue
We were worried about dengue,
another of the old school epidemics
brought back by Cuba. Museo del mundo
brought back not just the old buildings, but disease.
But there were no bugs in Vedado,
no bugs in Habana Vieja.
Pops says they used to have spray trucks
drive around in the middle of the night,
gas rising, flies falling.
He says this as I wonder of the tumor that
grows/grew, in his head, wondering if that
gas killed more than just what flies.
There are no beggars here, no piles of garbage
on the corners, the buildings typically have
four walls, the dogs four legs,
even the police don’t bother.
We go to Hotel Comodoro, out in Miramar
where little pools of blood geyser up my arms,
where temples form blushing pink, where the
quitos prayed where nothing was sprayed.
I wonder if I’ll wake up sick.
And the people, the security, don’t understand
why we are here. They try to send us back.
For our safety, so nothing happens to us;
for their safety, in case something happens to us.
And now I know where they don’t spray,
and now I see,
another place where they don’t clean the
streets of Cuba, of Cubans,
and of what is left for them.
Something that would grow in my brain,
like a benign tumor.
Christopher Louis Romaguera is a Cuban-American writer who lives in New Orleans, Louisiana. He was born in Hialeah, Florida and graduated from Florida International University in Miami, Florida. He has an MFA in Creative Writing at the University of New Orleans. Romaguera has been or will be published in Pleiades, Passages North, Catapult, PANK Magazine, Massachusetts Review, Latino Book Review and other publications. He is a monthly columnist at The Ploughshares Blog and is the Poetry Editor at Peauxdunque Review. Romaguera was an Editorial Intern at Electric Literature. He is a VONA alum. Romaguera was a 2023 Periplus Fellow. His translation of the novel, Charras: A True Novel of the Assassination that Roiled the Yucatan was published by UNO Press in 2025.
Banner Art:
The Descent of the Angel, Enrique Zaldivar, 2016, Wikimedia Commons
