Day Done Clean

Breeze passes.
A slumber grows through night.
Wind carries light till dirt rustles underneath the first
hoof of the morning.
Family cows yawn their “marnin’ neighbor.”
Big-hearted bulls stretch and skip a cold bucket shower.
Pasture and soil, overturn.

Rice is rising.
Boots ready on dirt.
The children curl into bed
toes peeking out from the coolest crinkle of sheet.

“Day done clean!” row the noontime aunties
with their coconut brooms and karahi pots full of masala.
Onions start to crackle their chutney songs.
Oil clinks its calypso riddim below.

And the pot spoon shouts,
“Blessed be the mother of this lazy congregation
in the house of
busy cows and busier fathers.”
The children turn in bed,
they’ll greet sunrise another day.
Have conversations under the lamppost.
After sun touches coast.

Under mosquito nets,
they’ll forget about rice paddies and plant their lazy legs in bed till de
rooster dem stop crow
the cows come home
till sun lays down dreamily
and moon washes it back down to its earth.

Walking Home in Grandpa’s Guyana

I place my hand in moonlight and it sinks into my skin
the way it did many daughters and sons ago.

I come from a place where the spirits walk among us.
They carry black kerosene lamps. Ask me to fetch parcels for their friends.
Walk with your eyes straight, they snarl.
Don’t think to look back.

I oblige.
Like my grandfather did.
And his father too.
We are forever tied to the skeletal shadows that rise from night.

I walk the old sugarcane plantations, feel for the comfort of trees.
But there are only gravestones of bone under the
cassareep sky that bleeds black.

Hoofs of colonial horses resound on the fields.
Breath tickles the turning maze of the ear.
Fright creeps and curdles in the belly until
something beckons,
something calls,

“Turn around.”

Two eyes mek four.
A cry cracks from above a dark, clamoring jungle.

Sour smells form.
The smooth of fresh decaying skin touches my
own and
slowly, slowly
the rotting squish of
juicy blood-pulp
drip
drip

drops.

In the moonlight of wandering jumbie dreams,
I learn quickly.

Like my grandfather did
and his father too.

Beware of
playful spirits
hiding in the trees
shaking rotten mangos from their
slippery, green leaves.