Camilo, you are my friend.
We drink and talk too loud
about topics hushed
en la calle.
Politics, Revolution,
Anything Outside the Revolution.
Staying up too late,
the night dies down
before we do.

Camilo, you are a political prisoner.
Arrested before the press could see you
swept into the clogged storm drain of a prison
Your mother is a Dama en Blanca
white cloth, black skin
thrown in the mud,
in an unmarked van.

Camilo, you are the pain of the people.
You are spilled blood that curdles,
an itch thirsts for scratch, a wound scabs
then gets picked off
spilling once again.
You are the not-televised revolution.

Camilo, you were my contact.
Getting me wifi from an
itchy nosed hookup.
In a park, filled with guards,
heads swivel.
I pay a dollar,
I contact home.
I pay a dollar
to get you Facebook.
You can’t get Facebook.

Camilo, you are
a man neither government wants you to see.
You let me into your house.
The kind that tourists take
pictures of from outside
museo del mundo
Tourists treating
the masses like museum
exhibits. You have half a cheek
of a toilet. A mosquito net
a soggy bed. You say
four families live in four corners here.
I’m not even sure the walls meet.

Camilo, you are sick.
Drinking rum from a carton.
You drop a lime on the floor,
stepping and rolling on it.
Para hablando el jugo.
for without stepping/stomping/dancing,
even the limes are dry.
The Revolution thinks
you are a dry lime
only good if stepped on.
They don’t realize/care the good
guys don’t step on people
like limes.

Camilo, you are my late-night rum stroll.
You waltz around debris,
soldiering through, like you’ve
always done, like I’ve dreamt I’ve done,
like I dream I’ll keep doing, learning.
Curfew is a six-letter word;
you laugh in its face.

Camilo, you are my past.
Sitting at your primo’s house.
We are Miami
watching TV;
you yell of your dictator.

Camilo, you are my hustler. Asking
ten dollars for a cab.
A tourist price I don’t even pay.
This is a scam.
I am my own disappointment.

Camilo, you are my stood-up date.
I leave you hanging,
I can’t keep my head swiveling like you.
This land is still so foreign to me.
I drink rum from a balcony
and stare at the street,
hoping you catch me

hiding.

Camilo, you are my mirror.
Would I be you,
if my family stayed?

Camilo, you are my nothing.
I do not own you.
You owe me nothing.
I hate what the world has done to us.

Camilo, you are more than what I can define
in some verse, some phrase, some line.
You are a person everyone discards after a
single serving.

Camilo, I am your meal ticket.
Your bank.
Fuck my feelings.
Why can’t I
be your sustenance?
Why can’t I be the stone
of a lime you step on?
Why can’t I talk like the lime’s
juice for you?

∞

Christopher Louis Romaguera is a Cuban-American writer who lives in New Orleans, Louisiana, US.  He has an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of New Orleans. Romaguera has been published in Passages North, Catapult, PANK Magazine, Massachusetts Review, Latino Book Review and other publications, and was a contributor at The Ploughshares Blog. His translation of Charras: a true novel of the assassination that roiled the Yucatán by Hernán Lara Zavala, was published by the University of New Orleans Press in 2025.