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Kevin A. González

Kevin A. González was raised in Puerto Rico, received his MFA in poetry at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and is now a fellow at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His poems have appeared in Callaloo, Hotel Amerika, and Poetry. His story, “Statehood,” won the Playboy College Fiction Contest.

Author

Wake

Spring 2006 | Fiction

It’s New Year’s Day and I’m on my godfather’s Dusky doing 5000 rpm on the North Sound of Virgin Gorda with a mechanic named Michael Jackson at the helm. He’s shoved the twin Evinrude controls all the way down on the console, and I keep trying to sip my beer, but it spills all over my face until there is nothing but dead wind left inside the bottle. A boomerang-shaped key glides past our starboard, and scattered marinas dot the port side, with their schools of masts rasping the sky and the unrelenting logos of petroleum empires stenciled against the green backdrop of the mountains. The other night, my father mistook the orange Gulf sign at Leverick Bay for a full moon: drunk, wearing his sunglasses, hitting on a young bartender from St. Kitts.