Alessandra Gonzalez

The Super Cool DJ

Before I knew him as an engineer, coming home telling stories of sombrero-like antennaes and
kickass cell service, smelling of fiber and oil on his button-down, before I learned he’d spent all
night in comically large earphones anticipating other people’s excitement spinning house music
and disco tracks in a mansion with a dance floor he couldn’t afford, years before his insecure
Spanish-coded brain started asking for me to proofread his work e-mails each afternoon, to teach
him how to use the Oxford Comma because he created his genius writer daughter, long before he
bought the old fishing boat and the backyard became his home office, his agenda filled with
appointments to fix everything – but far too proud to heal his back. A lifetime before he could no
longer pick me up, years and years before herniated discs, he carried me on his shoulders at a
party. Now, minutes after I watch him lie on the floor in exhaustion, I remember those days, us
holding hands (mine not fitting into his quite as well as they do now), smelling cigar smoke,
when he told me that years ago, before he was my father, he was a “super cool” DJ right here in
Miami. Right in the middle of the eighties, when he met a beautiful singer with enormous curls
at a party who later became my mother. How he spent his nights gathering people together, with
the ability to predict the right songs to make them all dance. Now, he cracks a joke and I laugh –
seconds before he drops the tears into my eyes and asks me to help him up.

The Cracking Lighthouse

At Crandon Park, Miami, FL

El Farito rises out of deep blue, its light

flickers like an old friend casting a glow

over frothy water lapping at its base,

it should still be freshly painted and

indestructible. My cousins and I should

still be sucking down ice pops, arguing

over whose tongue was the bluest.

Still dragging our grandmother

down at midnight and begging

her to let us jump into the water.

Her thunderous laughing as

we emerge in our wet pajamas,

arms wide open with a towel and

radiating warmth.

My grandfather still on the sand

of El Farito, his fingers strumming his guitar

and his eyes glistening as he harmonizes

with my father. We should all be laughing

as he improvises, taking breaks

only to puff on a cigar. The sun

setting behind the lighthouse at

El Farito, where I should still be

spreading aloe over my cheeks

to soothe the burning.

Instead I am    twenty-one driving to the hospital again,

a place I’d never     imagine frequenting this young.

I want to      blame God, or nature, for putting the

cracks in the lighthouse, for fading the colors so soon.  I want to

fill in the cracks, paint the lighthouse  and paint the cheeks

of my grandparents pink to bring back their youth.   I want to

find them and El Farito exactly as it was

and pretend for a moment,

that all water does not return to its wave.