COURTNEY CONRAD
Cuba a Bawl Living Eye Wata
America, thrilled at the opportunity to be ravenous, decrees
an oil blockade, and our island becomes an orange,
turned inside out. Gutted. What is it to live
on the precipice of ruin? It is rubbish
lining the streets like traffic markings.
Airports receiving nothing but dust,
no tourists’ lips savouring our rum and cigars.
I’m thinking of the four hundred closed Western Unions
as bone saws, severing outstretched limbs, offering remittances.
The hospitals, operating on the hamster wheel of doctors’ devotion.
Meanwhile, our wind-up radios double-dutch reports
that our torment is self-inflicted
and that this short-term suffering will free Cuba forever.
We refuse to jump in to entertain such rancid rants.
Instead, our fathers sit under cellphone torches, slamming dominoes.
Our mothers twirl each other in and out of the slivers of light
as their charcoal-stained hands cook rice and sausages to uplift hung bellies.
Our neighbours, no longer distracted by staring into our darkness, but
as Jamaicans say, tiddeh fi mi, tomorrow fi yuh.
How to Make a Spectacle of Fishing
Everyting but dis Papa warn mi bout
when mi seh mi a tun fisherman,
like how di wata can send mi
adrift easy like floating yard slippas.
I can’t remember the first time
I heard of a US military airstrike,
but they were like a duppy
in one of Granny’s veranda stories,
one I thought I would never cross paths with.
Unaware that my innocence was in question,
I suppose with an active imagination, fishing hooks
could be mistaken for heavy artillery, seaweed for ganja
and a pile of fish scales for crack, especially from a bird’s eye view
or by intelligence as credible as susu-susu Suzie.
The monstrous noise hurtling towards us, scarier than Mama’s footsteps
on Saturday mornings for cleaning when I was a likkle yute.
Didn’t know whether to freeze like when mi see mongrel or tun merman.
How could I buss off a prayer quicker than the kaboom?
America’s negligence, a tsunami. Our bodies, disposable as fish carcass.
