Summary

“Port of Spain, 2002” describes the speaker’s experience of moving from the United States to the island of Trinidad when she was a young girl. At first the move is very difficult for the speaker, as she and her family of four have to rent a one bedroom apartment, trading cicadas for car alarms and having to sleep with the window open because she is allergic to the air conditioner. However, as time moves onward she gradually adjusts and things begin to get better, until “America became a city/where [she] never owned a camera/and had no proof that [she] ever lived there/except a few scars” (16). The poem ends as the speaker concludes, “they kept calling this place an island/they kept saying we were floating/and small” (16).

In “The Only Thing I Brought From America” the speaker describes her initial...