POSTS

syan jay

(Blood) Quantum Mechanics

:: the fundamental theory that describes
             nature at the smallest scale of energy

             from atomic and subatomic ndns ::

have you ever seen how the sun clears
             a saguaro? a billion phosphorous petals

ruptured on the spines of its fruit,

coming to bubble like diabetes-pricked fingers.
             my uncle told me that no one appreciates
ndn science—they could never know how
an auntie beads algorithms and protein structures
                          with just the
             right shades of blue and yellow.

these are original tricksters
bound to knowledge, without
needing words, to know what has been cannibalized
by colonial teeth.

how can you
measure genocide? by carnage, weak tongues,
             or fealty to blood laws?

could i know an elder who comforts this body
without gender but full of violence measured
                          against it?

                          [the uncertainty principle states
             that both the position and the momentum
of the free particle ndn

cannot be measured with complete white
             precision]

i learn to paint my face with patience
while my mind watches light refracting
between the window and a man’s eyes, belonging

to the hand who holds a depressor
             on my tongue, spreading papillae
                          like the legs he will attempt to explore later,

                          as he asks me if my family has a
             history of alcoholism? and did i
read about what is happening at Standing Rock?
             but is not interested in what i say,
                          until two days later:

             i crawl into the emergency room,
kidneys beginning to fail.
             the nurse asks why i didn’t come in earlier?
                          how did i even manage to get there?

             how do you explain that your dna
is fortified by braids of anguish? that after so much
             time and attempted assassinations,
                          even the smallest [subatomic] ndn
             knows every wound and how to survive it?

Loanword for a Body

the satellites above, in metal bondage, are trans-                                                                    mitting
             information to thankless people
             whose hands flicker each other’s holes,
             as the moon swallows the shadow of its former
the prairie, where I was born, was once trans-                                                                           sected
             by a pink sun, split open in the sky
             from my mother’s singing
             & my throat echoing her in cries
when Creator made me, they were trans-                                                                                   lating
             not-girls & not-boys into whole people
             w/ knees inventing new words as they opened & closed
             & when asked for my name, silent I’s dripped from my lap
on the day I return to the crows, my body trans-                                                                  gendered
             ceremony w/ yellow ochre swept on unzipped skin,
             my two young sisters will sing & cut apples
             to feed the feathered & femme pallbearers,

             who during my wake
              will feast & hold me as their own
              before letting the river silt
              know the true name of this body.

My safeword is restless

We have an apartment with a small patio
& we can hear every inch of rosemary
grow from the herb garden. We watch
cottontails scamper down the cement wall
separating us from “colonial”-style homes.
We stop making jokes about the houses.
We grow tired of ruminating on the same scab.
We know the past is preserved in error here.
We have no children & I start making tea
to make my body feel useful during the long
afternoons where even the breeze cannot fill
such absences. It is early summer & sweat
collects at the back of our knees. We explore
the salt of each other. I share with your mouth
& its wounds. We fuck carelessly, leaning on
the window, afternoon sun nesting on our heads.
We run our fingers through each other’s hair,
scalps warmed, & what we feel takes the place
of want. Do you think there is a universe where
instead of rosemary, the garden grows white roses,
& the cottontails turn into salesmen for vacuums?
Could we learn how to hold onto that life too?
The version where we make comfort from what
we are given? & the one where our want died
& was replanted in the soil? & the one where even if
we try to coax it out, our want feels no need to bloom?

syan jay is an agender, Dzil Łigai Si’an N’dee (White Mountain Apache) cyberbrat who lives in invaded Nipmuc/Massachusett/Wampanoag land. They are the winner of the 2018 Pacific Spirit Poetry Prize by PRISM International. Their work has been featured in wildness, Barrelhouse, Glass Poetry, Palette Poetry, and more. Their debut poetry collection Bury Me in Thunder is forthcoming with Sundress Publications. You can find more of their publication history and additional information at syanjay.com, or on Twitter @mxsyanjay.

 

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E. Kristin Anderson

Hands Open for a Ricochet

                                          (a golden shovel after Kesha)

My breath comes cold, a sort of invitation—the light’s been
waning thin like the iron in my blood. You’ve underestimated
the ink stains on my tongue—now the gap in my teeth is my

personal vortex of filth. I’ll sway the sinister with this entire
mouth filled with flickering candles and salt sparkling to life,
just letting go of secrets, my hair laced with truth. Tonight I

believe in satin and stereo and, from the windows, I know
vitriol—and I ask it to dance. This city is a place for people
who would rather be birds; I hide the feathers. I’m gonna

spin in the stars if the blood lets me, a ghost coming to talk
trash at the threshold and on the street. I’m breaking the shit
you left on the high shelf—glass turns to bees. Look up and

taste the ending now on my lips to live and to burn. Darling,
I’m the root of the apple and the heart of magnolia—that’s
how I’ll bend and break to sting you and how I’ll still be fine.

Girl Is a Fever to Burn the Brick

                                          (a golden shovel after Kesha)

I can’t wait another day to turn the lights on. Using my mouth I
tear myself from this page at dusk. The body knows—it’s been

my flannel and silk to sink into the savory, to hold onto bad living
and more crows tapping at the window. The oak presents itself in

splinters, slides into my skin. I drink myself like a rich red tea, a
warm reminder of the ash and the vein. Seeds are the lonesome

chords striking my vertebrae, the overripe fruit of an entire galaxy
come to die beautiful in garbage. When I wake I am nothing but

little orange bottles. And I am the dirt and the gravel the roses in
my teeth the yarrow down my arms the stiff feathers set to let my

fingers loose to touch the rough bark of the world. These are my dreams
floating in water. No, drowning. No, walking in waves, foaming breath. I

wash my hands in a puddle of apple blossoms, crush the flowers, see
that tired coyote, her teeth out. I take your cooling embers, put them

behind my lips, wear them like diamonds. I’m here and I come
to claim the magic of paper and silver, the mystery of heart and

snake. I let the lace touch my knees and step outside to rescue
myself from the duality of virtue, a human touch to haunt me.

E. Kristin Anderson is an author, poet, Starbucks connoisseur, and glitter enthusiast who formerly made magazines with The New Yorker and read submissions for Found Poetry Review. Currently she’s an assistant editor at The Boiler and an editorial assistant for Sugared Water. She is the editor of the literary anthologies Come As You Are (Anomalous Press) and Hysteria (Sable Books, forthcoming), and is the author of nine chapbooks including Pray Pray Pray: Poems I wrote to Prince in the middle of the night, A Guide for the Practical Abductee, Fire in the Sky, 17 seventeen XVII, and Behind All You’ve Got (forthcoming). Kristin grew up in Maine and has a B.A. in Classics from Connecticut College and currently lives in sunny Austin, Texas.

 

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Xandria Phillips

SEX DREAM IN THE KEY OF APORIA

I half-wake in sudor, queer vernacular forgotten in the sinew of sleep.
Wetted by a man whose saunter turns

                                                                            my breed diaphanous,


I fasten myself to his shared anatomies while he ascribes me
to the shades of children we’d make.

                                                                            Sex, my choice


harness for affection, I falter before unreining curiosity.
Trans time and space,

                                                                            I follow the russet roads inside


myself, Accra lanced into my neural system still. My intra-continent sweats
through shirts, and drinks stout,

                                                                            though it tastes of displacement.


I still have a penchant for what misconstrued me, to live among kin in exclusion.
Awake, I don’t conflate touch with knowledge,

                                                                            so my projected selves approach


the helm as nimbus parts me. Their mission is simple.
I buck their tether

                                                                            They tighten its hold.

Never have i ever

            dated a Black person – my father, 2019

never knowing
            the sun’s blue genus

lipped along the back
as the light of a new day

            presses infinitesimal color
into the both of you

there is for me no other
way to tether love

between this vessel
            and the luminous spools

I cast against my ocean’s skin
at the hull of me latent lyrics

            at the helm an onyx compass
-wielding child

villageless in all their wanting

Xandria Phillips is a is a poet, educator, visual artist, and the author of the chapbook Reasons For Smoking, which won the 2016 Seattle Review chapbook contest judged by Claudia Rankine. Xandria’s debut poetry collection, HULL will be published this fall through Nightboat Books. They are the poetry editor at Honeysuckle Press and the curator of Love Letters to Spooks, a literary space for Black people. Their poetry is featured and forthcoming in Virginia Quarterly Review, Black Warrior Review, Crazyhorse, and elsewhere.

 

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m/ryan murphy

Horse Blood

However determinate one’s genetic inheritance, it must still, as it were, be woven into the present, an activity that necessarily involves both receptivity to the specific shapes and textures of that present and a spontaneous creativity in adjusting oneself (and one’s inheritance) to those contours…that we speak of by the term “perception”.
-David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous

The abject is an end of one kind of organism,                     meaning

we are birthed into the rhythm of                            human

until shocked into the pace of a flayed antelope     seeking safety.

How this run from community      undoes         all dialectics.

Art loses value.           Only speaks toward         commodity.

We call this the near future               or a parallel now.

A human                       on all fours

or injected                      with horse

blood.                      A beating heart           beaten

backward taking           vitality soaking          the sun

red or                               ridding                       we.

Personages                    swell into         disarticulation.

The shape of stratum then rounds into

an engorged                           timeline  ;

it’s gritty with bits of                  fossil too

much death to contain it all.             We

say take time to grieve                         to find

a creativity that erupts out from         nothingness.

We suppose a nothingness    always         we say

sight will lead us without worry             no

touch to lead us through             “those     contours”.

We call this growth        really           booming

out from the inherited                   forcing

everything into                    something     ,

but what of                         entropy    ?

Grossing your         self out            enough

to shock the system         into change.

An antelope        with thread and needle

cannot suture                itself–       withers.

Upending the Illusion of One

Borrowed Catharsis

The ground rips open &
I know this isn’t cosmopolitan
but it feels productive.

At dusk, I grow
as vibrations charge
& settle in my feet,

reaching roots
infused with
total chaos.

I shiver, then
the chasm
shifts.

Dirt falls
inward like
a fragment.

I borrow a neighbor’s
catharsis, craft a ball
of it-gets-better

suck it dry
hand it back.
It’s how I know

I’m alive.
I’m hungry &
my arms stay put

like wet tree leaves,
I glow briefly but
been boundless

too often unaware
of the heaviness
peace harbors.

I dim.
The sun’s down &
fog leaves me

all milky
slick &
functionless.

A corpse
A this-work-needs-grounding
A finger flinging dirt

Or my father’s
arms in water,
around me –

The quotidian is gross
like that. A sentence
working in tandem.

A winter cloud is grey
never pink
nor white.

Perfect strangers lay
against grass against
me in this thicket saying:

when you say, oh no division
you say, oh no division
say, oh no division

oh no division
no division
division

& if the voice
no longer heals you,
cradle the body.

m/ryan murphy lives in Brooklyn, NY via Mississippi. They were named a finalist for The Poetry Project’s 2018-19 Emerge–Surface–Be Fellowship. Some of their work exists in or is forthcoming from Entropy, The Felt, The Poetry Project Newsletter, Cosmonauts Avenue, and Bone Bouquet. The rest explores nonhuman rights, caesurae, queerness, and language’s existence beyond the confines of the page. Virtually friend them @mryanmurphy.

 

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Kathryn Merwin

To Woman (Persona as Dirt)

Litany in Addition and Subtraction

Figure 1:

If a girl has six plums and gives five away, how many plums does she have left? How many seeds? How much skin?

Answer:

A girl has one plum. No seeds. No skin. Just a moon-ripe fruit, bitten down to jagged core.

Figure 2:

If a girl has six children and gives three away, how many children does she have left? How many fingers? How many eyes?

Answer:

A girl has six eyes. Sometimes brown. Sometimes blue. A girl has thirty fingers, all of them stained with plums and plums and plums.

Figure 3:

If a girl has six hearts and gives two to her mother, two to her daughter, two to a stranger, how many hearts does she have left? Will they grow back like rough-cut violets? Will they bruise when they are touched? When they are not?

Kathryn Merwin’s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in journals such as Cutbank, Passages North, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Birdfeast, Sugar House Review, Prairie Schooner, and Blackbird. She has read and/or reviewed for the Bellingham Review and The Adroit Journal, and serves as co-editor-in-chief of Milk Journal. She received her MFA in poetry from Western Washington University and currently lives in the District of Columbia. Connect with her at kathrynmerwin.com.

 

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Kinsey Cantrell

triptych

notabody

give it to me straight, doc

a medical event, in 3:

Kinsey Cantrell is a Brooklyn-based poet. Her work has appeared in Datableed, New Delta Review, Bomb Cyclone, petrichor, Rogue Agent Journal, and elsewhere. She is on the social media and events teams for VIDA: Women in Literary Arts, and she received her BA/MA in Creative Writing from Miami University of Ohio. She can be found online at kinseycantrell.com and on Twitter @kinseymads.

 

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Tricia Allen

ghosts

Ghosts float across these lines
sour-faced shadows
float across this house

white as the night
heavy with dust
and the scent of rain

Ghosts swallow smiles
gnaw at my lines
mouths full of teeth.

the colour of drought

When she arrive, she wear disguise:
her face covered with bandana
yellow dress swinging in evening breeze
yellow dress clinging to skin
You would think she is festival queen
The way she moving in the breeze
 
Everybody come look
because they never see a woman tall so
and proud so wearing the sun in her skin
You ask her to wine her hips
and you play music,
beating the drums deep into the night

So she dance for you,
twisting her hips
loosening the yellow
revealing nakedness
the colour of terracotta  
and yet she getting hotter still
wearing the sun in her smile

You feel like is fire inside you
a fire twisting                                                                                                                                                                                                         you insides into ash
a fire that sucking the earth beneath you dry
But you watch her dancing                                                                                                                                                                               

                                      still mesmerized by her nakedness
or was it the sunlight in her yellow dress?

 

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Arturo Desimone

MONUMENT FOR THE ROSENBERGS IN ZAPATA STREET IN HAVANA

I stand–elbows and knees locked–before an idol,
of mock-marble faded by the sun that shot
through the whorled branches of the Ceiba tree:

Here, stands a statue for the Rosenbergs,
in Zapata street, in Havana.
The date of the murder,
and an inscription that reads
as a friend’s personal note to Julius
& Ethel Rosenberg.
Here, in the shadow of the Ceiba;
and in weak adobe bread-oven-brick and mortar:
acknowledged,
that you were
murdered.

A boy on a bicycle selling plastic junk hisses ‘Pssst’ to catch my attention
But I am not interested in his plastics,
while standing here: before a statue for the Rosenbergs,
here: in Zapata street.

My grandmother Naomi saw them, on TV
when they were still alive.
She danced the jitterbug in her youth (but not on that day)
Naomi cried for Frankie
Sinatra, when he died…

A pain behind my lungs is my heart, excised
by shining black blade from most poems;
but the pain in my pain,
surges from boiled tap-water
they use in the guayaba
and in tamarind juice
to dilute—
I carry, in my pocket
poems of Juan de la Cruz:
who was tortured,
sentenced and, once, a Jew.
He sent himself Up to a cloud
when he wanted to….

A bruise, in my mystic forehead
remembers: Russian ruins, Persian ruins,
rubble brought to the tropics.
Rubles, too.
Ruins, brought to the lips,
in a baby-spoon with guayaba,
spoiled and made of me a mangled scribe.

In heaven, electric chairs zoom,
dragging curtains and chains,
with anvils and ploughs down below, and Rosa
Luxembourg
saying ‘’Those who do not move,
do not see their chains.’’
Electric thrones just reek of such Christian Apocalypse—
You know, the one with hell in it—
Nobody intends to be Executioner,
when blaming a Cruz,
or pinning it
on The Russians.

Further down alphabetically ordered road,
looms the Necropolis: most vast,
patient cemetery of the Americas,
(Executioners and executed, by pelotón squad.)
Black carcasses of birds and lambs,
left as offerings to darken outside
the yolk-coloured high walls,
across the street from myriad flower shops,
for gladiolas, and those deigning more decorum.

Jews bring and drop stones,
not hyacinths for the dead.
Flowers as Kaddish are gifts
for the living, as the Spring.
On the other hand, someone’s
been depositing slain roosters
for the dead. But that practice falls neither
under the date-palm shade of kosher,
nor under the taller
Cruz.

It is not a ruse,
that Havana
sports no fewer than 4 synagogues,
and many feuds
(the Grand Synagogue
shares the multiplex
edifice with the Brecht theatre)
And never
did war conflagrate between them.

Such wars go unmentioned,
in official Samson-census history, at least—
But many a tamarind-bitter tale stands scrawled,
engraved even,
on invisible bathroom walls of Jericho—
and under bark and whorled root of the Ceiba,
tree of life, which stands, sprawls–
Guarded by the Chichirricú,
(the dweller, who says “cheecheereecoo!”)
its spirit, Guardian Cherub…


Arturo Desimone, Arubian-Argentinian writer and visual artist born in 1984 on the island Aruba, which he inhabited, emigrated to the Netherlands at the age of 22 after writing the poem ”Age 22.” Author relocated to Argentina, while working on a long fiction project about childhoods, diasporas, islands and religion. Desimone’s articles, poetry, and fiction pieces have previously appeared in CounterPunch, Hinchas de Poesía, Moko, Island mag, Círculo de Poesía , Sydney Review, New Orleans Review, and he writes a blog about Latin American poetry  for Anomaly, Notes on a Journey to the Ever Dying Lands. This April sees the release of a collection of poems related to politics of the (mostly Mediterranean) sea, Poems of the Costa Nostra / Mare Nostrum, with Hesterlglock, a UK press. In March, a different poetry collection, Ouafa and Thawra, gets released with African Books Collective.

 

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Divya Persaud

kala pani

consorting in the kala pani
a sea snake ruptured against
the insides of the selachii
cuts her tail into their guts, whence

spill their finite utterings: she,
stretched among three, collects
these words of her brine suspects
and rebuilds herself from the sea-

water that envelops their entrails—
shark shattered upon shark, froth
rots their cage-bones; uncaught,
darkness welcomes her slick sails.

she and it devour each other—devour—
as the sharp-things do cower

a provocation

sorrel coat my throat in blood—
                hibiscan, wretched, teeth-cut red;
the angle of a pupil bred
                in venal entanglement, floral

against my tongue, in these eyes;
                drop this in the sea and watch it turn,
frustrated in the bodies’ churn
                to chew those bones so sentenced—

shut my irises from that star’s light-show
                and let a tracheal tsunami break
and let it rake blood and bone, slow
                and let it cut, and let it grow;

and see this flower in my sight
                and see this crimson flutter here
and see her blossom from my fear
                and watch the sun impart the night

on these my eyes, red—
                in this my throat, red—
unto this my blood, red—
                for these teeth, so red

Demerara yields to no country in the world (based on Wanderings in South America by Charles Waterton)

a wave might resign
              into a lagoon

              refract
into itself

out from itself
              a river

              meeting an
ocean

algal gauze

wrapped around
              its feet

              upturned and
browned

in the
              sun.

a bee procured about a clump of several species of nightshades, which were flowering in thinned-out jungle (based on Bees from British Guiana by T.D.A.
Cockerell)

a hummingbird with black eyes
meets those surfaces with mine—

cracks my integumental dome,
reaches into my purple-tinted thorax

              through this heart-chest
              through this star-shard-laden

heat; a tongue which extends
not beyond my abdomen—struck

              silent in the salted air brought
              on those wings from the sea—

a banded abdomen, a fuliginous
flurry, the sound of this

              extreme apex, snapping, dusky:
              integument of clypeus black

the heat of the water (based on Up the Mazaruni for Diamonds by William La Varre)

you drop a pearl from your palm
              into my depth; the sun-caught
fish-things dash away and let

it through. Rests its head on a
              blackened pillow. Tosses and
turns; lifts for a moment, then

rests once more. You are always
              giving me strange gifts. This
one doesn’t know where it is.

I see it flinching still at the
              heat of the water. Open a
mouth wide, close it, open,

looking for something from that
              undarkened skin that rests
atop me—gulping, in the meantime,

unsure whether it drinks from
              the fires of Phaeton or the
milk of the wide, kind Lethe—

it matters not. A scorch and a
              forgotten scale of memory look
the same in the lacquer of a

pearl. I know a portage must
              be made, and I pull together
tree bones and send the

pearl on its way, downriver,
              where it might wash up on
              the mangroves, and still.

Divya M. Persaud is a writer, composer, and planetary scientist of Indo-Caribbean heritage from New Jersey. She is the recipient of The (Great) Indian Poetry Collective Editor’s Choice Award for her experimental book of poetry, do not perform this (GIPC, 2019), and the author of poetry collections color (2016) and de caelo et tellure (2015). Her poems have appeared in The Deaf Poets Society as well as The Aerogram. Divya is additionally the composer of THEY WILL BE FREE: a song cycle (2017), an album that fuses epic poetry and contemporary classical music. Divya is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in planetary imaging in the United Kingdom.

 

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Des Seebaran

A Corbeaux Villanelle

Anyone could tell me why man stay so?
If you say yes, they must say no.
Playing dead to catch corbeaux.

My friend had a man, real nice darkie
But he leave her dry dry cause he mother say so.
Anyone could tell me why man stay so?

Moms say she too dark, she can’t raise the blood.
She sanction a reds who bring her son low.
Playing dead to catch corbeaux

I see him last week; he loss he wuk,
she take house, child and put him outta road.
Anyone could tell me why man stay so?

Ah nex’ one I hear propose to a gyul
But getting him to marriage was like making it snow.
He play dead to catch corbeaux.

The slap up start right after wedding;
the ink still wet, but was blow after blow.
Anyone could tell me why man stay so?

She bloody and bruise six days out of seven,
but using concealer and calling it ‘glow’.
Playing dead to feed corbeaux.

The day she leave is the day she dead;
She pack a bag, he lock the door.
Anyone could tell me why man stay so?
Leaving the dead to catch corbeaux.

Oriki-Elegy For Vanessa

Vanessa, I loved your slow stride,
weighing your body on a cracked
pavement, dark skin glinting
on peeling walls, dark lips bold
under the trees of our small park;
every cut-eye purposeful, every
hip sway a tool. Vanessa, you wore
tight black dresses like a sin,
bracing, bubbling, not poised
to suffer fools.Vanessa, always armed:
weapons inked into your skin,
metal piercing clean through.
You preferred the scars you could control.
Vanessa, you always wore gold,
and some snatched wig, calling men
and women to arms in Murray Street night.
Vanessa, your man walking behind you
(who can remember his face?)
and young boy ahead. I saw you
scan the street for any who dared
maljo what was yours. Vanessa,
your rare laughter was more of
a flash of fierceness than of joy.
Vanessa, did they ambush you?
Did they feed you with the left hand?
Did they burn candles, scrape
bad mind into a calabash?
Vanessa, who flung you
like refuse down a precipice?
Vanessa, your wine-and-walk,
your thick slashes of jewelry didn’t
stop whoever from snapping your neck,
leaving you nude, fetid and foetal
on dark, rotting land. Vanessa, they
real outta hand, photographing
your body in pieces, and still,
you reposed like a badjohn,
even in your rigor. Militancy
still armoured into your skin.
They could not strip you enough
to make your flesh hide itself,
to force your skin to rot and run.
The earth refused to hold your body
until your life was sung.

Trinidad and Tobago Newsday, Tuesday October 11, 2016—The decomposing body of a woman found yesterday at the bottom of a precipice off Morne Coco Road, Maraval, has been identified as 28-year-old Vanessa Roxanne ‘Buffy’ Ackie. Police believe the woman, who was known to work on Murray Street, Woodbrook, was murdered and her body dumped in the bushy area.

Visitations

For Pearl

I

Jolted by a glimpse of you
along a rutted country road.
15 years ago,
they dragged me
to the funeral,
and it
felt like ashes
in my mouth.

The coffin open wide –
Over-painted mouth,
grey powdered skin;
clownish ruin of yourself.
Later,
I stood terrified as you shrieked,
blaming me
for how they dressed your corpse;
the dream fence contained
your rage
until your nine days passed,
and your body crumbled into
ashes.

You were ruthless with me,
ripping at my crooked stitches,
my wrinkled bed sheets,
insisting that I be good enough
until I was.
As methodically as you nurtured rose bushes,
plants that never
quite settled in this soil, and
withered quickly as your house emptied.

II

It is empty now.
All your plants and hedges are gone.
There are dried leaves
in the drains,

dust playing mas on your porch
as if it mattered.
And for 15 years, I have not known
how to reap peace from grief.

I hold now
glimpses of you,
links of the yellow gold you loved,
So I would remember your pruning,
and grow toward
the sun.
To see you
barrel by in that green,
rusted coffin of a car,
was a flash of light
to guide me;
a full moon to plant myself in,
and thrive.

Bury Me

[VERSION 1]

“When I dead, bury mih clothes;
I don’t want no sweet man to wear mih clothes.”
– Growling Tiger, When I Dead

Sweating, sweating
flinging words like
a real batonniere,
flinging lash like
I don’t know fear;

feeling the crack
of jumbie whip,
of bones,
of wood in every
footstep,
every dance step,
each stumbling trip
around
the gayelle.

I should ah be
a chantuelle,
to call up
a thickened night sky
and level the spirits
speaking tongues.

My breath lick like
flambeau,
flare like
a nine-night limbo,
my bwa is spirit-tipped,
and treacherous.
It only have one road
one ring
one place
for me.
My gayelle
inside
the cemetery.

When I dead, bury meh clothes

Is better I lavway
give way
put all my sins
behind me

mount the bwa
leggo

Let the throbbing kalinda
echo
across the gayelle
and into memory
Let them send back
a message in the buss head
and tell me why
I born seeing jumbie
in the wood

why I born so dread
so dry,
feeling to die.
Hold the poui
hold the poui
and pray.
The cutter drum leading the way.

Desiree Seebaran is a Trinidadian poet, writer & editor. She is an alum of the Cropper Foundation Residential Workshop for Writers (2010) and the inaugural Moko Magazine Poetry Masterclass (2018). Her work has been shortlisted for the 2014 small axe literary competition (poetry). She’s also been published in the Cordite Poetry Review 81 (May 2017) and shortlisted in Frontier Poetry’s Award for New Poets Contest 2017. In 2019, her poems “The Sweetest Horn” and “Bone” were published in Interviewing the Caribbean journal, and an earlier version of her chapbook manuscript Canal Water was chosen as one of three highly commended entries by judge Amy Wack in the 2018 PBS & Mslexia Women’s Pamphlet Competition.

 

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