Ken Holland

Greetings, I was fortunate enough to place first in New Ohio Review’s 2021 poetry contest and was a 2024 finalist in two chapbook contests, including Moonstone Arts Center which will be publishing the chapbook in 2025. I’ve had work widely published in such journals as Tupelo Quarterly, Rattle, Atlanta Review and Pedestal Magazine. Three Pushcart nominations and inclusion in a number of anthologies. Poetry forthcoming in California Quarterly and Tar River Poetry among others. More at kenhollandpoet.com

Habana

I’m in the backseat of a ’57 Chevy with a rebuilt Russian engine
in a city where lead-black pollution drifts like
lethal fog, as if Havana was nothing but a lung soaking in what’s
cancerous, and when the halogen lights of the highway
kick in at dusk they illuminate sheets of exhaust vibrant and fibrous.
I listen to how deeply the city breathes. How it pounds
its chest in rhythm to the heart-stop beat of an Afro-Cuban jazz quintet
holding forth in the basement of La Zorra y El Cuervo,
while at street-level a dark-skinned Cuban in a modified tux
stands sentinel against those of us who’ve been bored
by Purgatory, where what we’ve glimpsed of Heaven is altogetherr
too bright. To be alive is nothing if not improvisation
and what I hear of a West African-inflected sax carries enough rapture
to satisfy any myth of a second coming.

In Habana Vieja Hemingway held court at La Floridita where he practiced
his shining abuse of alcohol. On a typical night, fifteen
daiquiris. Which illuminated for me the tight path between Havana
and his home in Idaho where he’d placed the barrel
of a shotgun to his head. You can’t walk through his house in Havana
for they’ve left it exactly as it was the day he killed himself.
But you can look in through the windows. On the walls the heads and
throats of the African game he’d taken down. And the table
lined with liquor bottles standing as quietly and upright as a staff
of butlers, in unmoving discipline since 1960. The throat
of each taut with anticipation of one more drink. And for all
that happened in Idaho, here, at least, the walls and floors
are bloodless.

I can exhaust my sum knowledge of Spanish in a hundred and
forty seconds, and yet somehow I’m the one
to carry the conversation with most every taxi driver, half of them
asking me Cual ciudad es mas hermosa? Nueva York
o Habana? Habana, I tell them. Havana is more beautiful. And they smile.
Whatever the truth is, it has no place here. Poverty
is crushing but so is the beauty of this country. At the local market
I pay what amounts to thirty-five cents for a liter
of purified water and pocket the change as if hard earned, the stupid
satisfaction in exchanging a bank note for a bottle of water
and a splay of foreign coinage. Estupido Americano. I know this.
But that changes nothing. I’m making my way alone
through a country where English is as much an embargoed commodity
as technology. Where the stone fortresses overseeing

the city stand impregnable within the hours of a long gone century,
and now honeycombed with turistas who walk about
in their own quietude. More than history, it’s the silence I’ve come for,
the small inner court with its broken-slatted benches
and assemblage of cottonwood trees. Where, for the first time in this city,
I can hear the soft wind lofting in from the harbor.
What I’ve left behind in New York is not something new but something
very old. The ritual of heartbreak. Its dance of exhaustion.
Its primitive chant.