There Are No Ceibas in Chicago

By Salima Rivera
There are no ceibas in Chicago;
those great trees in whose tangled roots
my mother played in as a child
raising her ragdoll family.
She called them the Devil’s trees.
At night, I understood why
as I gazed at the enormous twists of wood—
jagged rents thru the raw enchanted earth
making a tropic connection
into Alice’s dream.
Crawling in on hands and feet,
I searched for the wondrous land
but the White Rabbit had moved
to the East Coast
and the Cheshire Cat
didn’t speak Spanglish.

Notes:

“There Are No Ceibas in Chicago” was first published in ECOS: A Latino Journal of People’s Culture and Literature 2, no. 2 (1983), and subsequently published in It’s Not About Dreams (Erato/Poetry, 2014).

This poem is part of the portfolio “Salima Rivera: A Chicago Rican Poet.” You can read the rest of the portfolio in the March 2024 issue.

Source: Poetry (March 2024)