Flight to Managua

He wasn’t there at the time we said.
Someone, a woman, told me he had been 
called to work. I asked for him through 
the orders window at the Short Stop. 
Beside grey Chryslers he asked 

if he could make me a hamburger. 
I said no, I was alright. The bent
manilla envelope had enough 
for a plane ticket. I wish I had $300 
to give Enrique, someone had said. 

He cried like men cry: inside themselves.
I wanted to cry, too, but I was thinking 
about red rice in Haiti, how in Cuba 
every day is the cigar festival. 
My chest was empty as a glass.

I wrote down my number, but I never 
heard if he made it. I think of him, 
in an open-air house, birds of paradise 
spread warm along mascarpone walls, sipping 
coffee tart as a dried cherry, a son in medical school. 

I wish I had let him make me a hamburger. 
We could have sat and talked a while,
grease and salt on our pillowing fingers, 
our lips slick, our skin softening
in the asphalt’s black, residual heat.  

Originally published in the San Antonio Review