The Night Tito Trinidad KO'ed Hacine Cherifi

I rode in the bed of a pick-up truck, raising a Corona to toast the moon. Six of us, we dumped ice and a case onto rugged metal—no styrofoam relief, no white custom to keep us cool. We didn't care the bottles rolled into each other, their acute chime beneath the blasting horns and gunshots echoing off the curb's molded lip. We didn't care, in the numb pool of ice and glass, that we live in a colony and the stripes of our waving flag yield a black shadow under pirated fireworks. We wanted only the sour smiles of lemons wrung into our bottles, our tanned skin soothed by something cool, the touch of fingers on a crisp steering wheel. We wanted the unofficial midnight parade to wind past the Dos Hermanos Bridge and Puerta de Tierra, into the Old City, all a rampage of black shadows above the faint blue cobblestone pleats.