This is Plahm’s most exuberant cultural-catalog poem since “The Word Is— / Dance,” and it operates by a similar engine: accumulation as celebration, the list as love letter. The opening—”CooooooooBaaaaaaaaa!”—is not a word but a yell, the vowels stretched to match the speaker’s excitement, the typography performing the sound of a man shouting across water toward an island he can see but cannot quite reach. The elongated vowels are the poem’s signature gesture, returning at the midpoint and the close like a chorus.

The adverb catalog that follows is the poem’s structural foundation: “Logically, / Geographically, / Culturally, / Linguistically, / Legally, / Economically, / Strategically, / Wonderfully, / Should be—” Eight formal adverbs building a rational case, and then “Wonderfully” breaks the pattern—the only adverb that is an emotion rather than a category. The dash after “Should be—” withholds the predicate, creating a suspense that the poem won’t resolve until its midpoint: should be the fifty-first state.

The cultural inventory is the poem’s heart, and Plahm handles it with the enthusiasm of a man working through a playlist and a menu simultaneously. The dances arrive first (Rumba, Mambo, Conga, Cha-cha-cha), then the music mutates into food: “Jazz turned into cuisine, / salsa, (dance and taste).” The parenthetical is the poem’s cleverest compression—salsa is both a rhythm and a condiment, both heard and tasted, and the parenthetical insists on holding both meanings at once. The “I Love Lucy” reference introduces Desi Arnaz without naming him, trusting the audience to hear “Babalú” and see the conga drum; the Dizzy Gillespie passage adds bebop to the cultural stew; Gloria Estefan arrives as “señorita” and “enchantment”; Celia Cruz is crowned “Queen of Salsa” and declared “the secret sauce / for engagement”—a phrase that works in the culinary, the romantic, and the military register simultaneously.

The fifty-first-state declaration is the poem’s political center, delivered not as an argument but as an inevitability: “It should have been / the Chosen, / for it’s fire and sweet desire.” The image of Cuba as a star “at the tip / of our flag” is both cartographic (Cuba sits at the tip of the Florida peninsula) and symbolic (the newest star, the brightest, the one that completes the constellation). The number “51” standing alone on its own line has the visual weight of a jersey number, a highway marker, a statement of intent.

The closing returns to the opening yell—”CooooooooBaaaaaaaaa!”—and adds the Spanish exclamation “¡Magnífico!” before dissolving into the poem’s most lyrical image: “swirling, swirling, swirling / in a magical mist / off the coast.” Cuba as mirage, as music, as mist—visible, audible, tantalizingly close, not yet arrived. The triple “swirling” is the poem’s last dance move, the hips still turning as the music fades.