Estas brutal, someone says about the heat or the boricua 
walking down the street with a dulce de leche. My sister shivers. 
I paraphrase a fever when I mount the stairs to the roof to swelter

I came to Alabama for the dreams

   of Sun Ra, who said he was born on another

impossible, uninhabitable bottom land and unreconstructed

We were tuned like two crystal sets to the race stations
where we heard the saxophones of the Black Zion.

In the dark we crossed the borders of the Caucasus