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Paco Sainte Sails Home
Richard Levine

After the war, Paco Sainte built
ships in bottles and sailed away
in one each night. It wasn’t long
before he discovered syringe-
rockets could get him farther faster.

”It’s just a place to go, where the war don’t,”
Paco said. He wanted to forget the tides
of blood and the ballistic dismemberments
of flesh. And he wanted never again
to be treated like a spic in America.

But he could not forget nor stop the dreams he had,
or make true the ones he was denied. He lived
like a hooked fish, flipping about and slapping
out the last gasps of its life on the boarded
bottom of a boat. So it came as no surprise:

Paco washed up on a beach one night,
bottles broken, ships wrecked, all aboard dead.

—
Richard Levine’s Now in Contest is forthcoming from Fernwood Press. A retired NYC teacher, he is also the author of Richard Levine: Selected Poems (FutureCycle Press, 2019), Contiguous States (Finishing Line Press, 2018), and five chapbooks. An Advisory Editor of BigCityLit.com, he is the recipient of the 2021 Connecticut Poetry Society Award. His review “Poetry for a Pandemic” appeared in American Book Review, Nov-Dec 2020, and the review “Spoils of War” is forthcoming.

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