Ritual for Remaking Yourself
DANIELLE BOODOO-FORTUNÉ
Dig up a tuberous root and replant it upside down,
fold into the earth foliage first, leaf upon bruised leaf.
Feed the exposed tuber with drops of milk
and tears. Spell your name with a sliver of bitten fingernail
on the underside of a bay leaf, burn inside a coconut husk
on a new moon evening. Say your own name. Picture yourself
in an open space, never in a room, never in a car, never behind a door.
You must make yourself free by just seeing it. Grind the ash with salt,
dip your finger, mark your body straight down the middle
in a vertical line from forehead to caesarean scar.
Call your water, cells and bone back, wind the invisible spool
with both hands. You must feed your body.
You must feed your body with both hands.
Call your water, cells and bone back, wind the invisible spool
in a vertical line from forehead to caesarean scar.
Dip your finger, mark your body straight down the middle.
You must make yourself free by seeing it. Grind the ash with salt
in an open space, never in a room, never in a car, never behind a door
on a new moon evening. Say your own name. Picture yourself
on the underside of a bay leaf. Burn inside a coconut husk
with tears. Spell your name with a sliver of bitten fingernail.
Feed the exposed tuber with drops of milk,
fold into the earth foliage first, leaf upon bruised leaf.
Dig up a tuberous root and replant it upside down.
You must feed your body.
You must wind back the invisible spool
with both hands. Dip your finger in a coconut husk
filled with ash, milk and tears. Spell your name in an open space.
Picture yourself folded into the earth, like a cut fingernail,
leaf upon bruised leaf, forehead to caesarean scar. Now make yourself
free by just seeing.
You must feed yourself by just being.
Make yourself, forehead to caesarean scar, leaf upon bruised leaf.
Earth yourself, body folded underneath a bay leaf, make your tears a spell,
dip into ash and milk with both hands. Feed your own name to a tuberous root,
replant it upside down on a New Moon evening. Spool your cells back with invisible hands, Call your water, root and thread back, call your doors by their names.
You must mark your freedom in a vertical line from forehead to pubic bone,
dig up the leaves, wash in foremilk. What was invisible, make seen.
Make your tears a spell, wind the spool back from the underside
of the door, from the car, from the bruised space in the earth where you were planted
unseen and upside down, your body a tuberous root filled with ash and tears.
You must feed yourself first. Say your own name.
The Naming of Things
Maybe First Woman did not know
what God was trying to say.
Maybe the language of the serpent
sounded like running water in her ear,
a sweet sighing, the curling tail of assent.
It’s true,
Sometimes meaning moves through a sound
like current, like darting silver
and other times it does not.
This is how it happens with names
of things too.
A man follows the sound of a Word
through the cerulean of doubt,
cleaves a new land across its breastbone
with his tongue.
He never asks the three hills their true names,
even when the parrots descend like green flame,
screaming the birth names of each river and valley.
The man, deafened by the distant echo
of the Word
cannot understand a thing.
What if, after all this time,
we never understood
what God was trying to say?
Perhaps if the great mother boa had come
down the mountain, unhinged her jaw
and swallowed the three boats whole,
it would all have been different
And when the river’s mouth whistles
at Nariva, empties a dark lung
into the roaring sea,
this language would not lodge
in our throats like splinters
from the hull of a broken boat.
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