GILBERTE FARAH
Adapted from an admissibility petition (Trinidad).
“The three men met [Sheila]
at a Bazaar, followed her through
a tunnel along her route.
Mr. H was alleged
to have made advances,
which she rejected.
She fled but was pursued,
knocked down, stabbed twice
in the throat, then carried
further into the tunnel.”
***
Long Circular Mall, Port-of-Spain
At the prison artists’ exhibition
under the glass-ceiling atrium
struts a murderer.
Master ringleader
Star-boy of reform
with the greatest of ease
no tailcoat caught between the knees.
Gapers come one, come all
Let the spectacle begin.
They marvel at his kingdom of Nod collection
Pegasus rearing bareback into pink clouds
a garland stairway to Easter-pastel heaven.
In a blacklight booth enclosure
a maximum-security officer unsheathes
a scene: Goddess Kali, and a Carnival queen.
I stand in awe of their freakish glow
forgetting the danger of overexposure.
But Sheila, how short was your fame?
Yet your act, most cunning —
Mistress of misdirection. I searched
cyberspace to know your face
So many shared your name:
a girl of seventeen who starved her newborn
a social influencer with a Valley-girl accent
a spirit healer from Arizona.
Sheila,
a book of baby names says your name could have evolved
from the Latin for blind, or a third century minor saint (also blind).
A few centuries forward, you’re just another girl down under.
Your name’s beginnings are as obscure as the tunnel
Three magicians pulled you through before they twice probed
your neck with the shattered rays of a rum bottle.
From the ultraviolet booth, I step
into the mall’s garish light, to squint
at the remains of the gallery of the surreal
A revolving wheel of irises laps down a drain
An Empress butterfly in superimposed wings
cuts herself from the canvas
And at last, an abstract Genesis
God’s hard-bang splattering open
the brain of the world.
Over dreadlocked Jesus’s portrait
your murderer swears I must
like his Facebook page,
search him up in an admissible
penned by a third-world commission
where he has also made his name.
He prays I sleight my hand
to a presidential plea.
I depart without mercy
and think of the piece
I might have got —
a daring finale,
a swiveling trapeze
a constellation of poxy stars
a vortex body, reeling
from the hair, hanging
by the teeth.
