Poetry

Because my Spanish is chips-and-salsa simple, and I am desirous of improving upon it, and delighted whenever I can puzzle out on my own some new word or phrase, I am listening in on the conversation of the two Cuban men next to me at the counter of the plumbing supply store in Little Haiti,…

First a startle of fragrances to remind me where I am: turf smoke blown through drizzle, oystery brine-tang over Quay Street. An umbrella-raking gale. Then mind-blowing blue above the town for a nanosecond       until my airport-bound rented windscreen               spatters with the weather’s wet           splash of anticipation and by an astral lope I’m…

Sunday. The bells, as expected. I cannot help it if I rise, if finding the room too fraught with light—all of it, the white walls, the rinsed notion (always almost inside then just out of reach) of God, your body gleaming in sleep where the sun falls on it and away from, falls on and…

Do I begin at the here and now, or does the story start with the first time my mother took the wheel— the first woman to drive in a country where men are afraid to walk? My mother’s story begins when the steam rises. It ends when it’s ready. Taste it. Does it need more…

translated by Phil Metres This drilling rig lies in the forest tundra. One rises on command, sleeps ears cocked, and waits for the cry “All hands on deck!” at an untimely hour, mindless of the weather. It snows here—but it’s summer in the States, and I’m free to conceive in futile ways what you eat…

Ti Kikit puts on some pink lipstick, stands on the Place Saint-Pierrein Pétionville. For this evening she has borrowed a friend’s plastic barrettes, eleven of them, each pinching a spongy braid at its base, dotting her head with pink. She likes that corner of the ChoucouneHotel—white bougainvilleas overflow from behind the walls, make her feel…

Ain’t no way this river or any other is wide enough to slow us down, no bust-gut half-ass ocean got the means nor the notion to make this anything but fine—                    why bother to slip on or out of that little bit of nevermind tonight cause it don’t matter none to rhythm and blues…

for Geneviève Pastre Early summer in what I hope is “midlife,” and the sunlight makes me its own suggestions when I take my indolence to the river and breathe the breeze in. Years, here, seem to blend into one another. Houseboats, tugs, and barges don’t change complexion drastically (warts, wrinkles) until gestalt-shift dissolves the difference….

Midday. The family sits behind Emmanuel’s corpse. His adolescent granddaughters, self-conscious, their bursting nipples squeezed in white Sunday dresses: three child brides for their grandfather’s funeral. Sweat gathers and tickles in the crease behind their knees. A veil of mosquito netting is spread over the body in the open casket. On the wall above the…