Ciao Pescado

by Christopher Romaguera

And it’s said like those

who understand joking

when they can’t take a fuck.

And now the fish are all gone,

and we turn everything into a song.

But how could all the fish be gone,

in a land framed by sea?

Restaurants hoard fish for tourists;

white out what they do or don’t have.

Restaurants whited out from Cubans,

they don’t have any day of the week.

But don’t you worry

the rich get all the fish anyway.

y en la mañana el picadillo

cause no matter how much you

grind something up,

there is no meat left on this ground.

Because if an island doesn’t have fish,

what do you expect the land to still have?

Because if an island can export all of its fish,

what do you think that government would do

to its unwanted?

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Christopher Louis Romaguera is a Cuban-American writer who lives in New Orleans, Louisiana. He has an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of New Orleans. Romaguera has been published in Passages North, Catapult, Massachusetts 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.

Photo by Ahmed Fareed on Unsplash