beautiful hand
Inclusion led her to an active shooter/
the barricade/hostage situation/
maintaining custody of a prisoner/
Outmanned – advance, can’t wait for backup
Category: Poetry
bi·sex·u·al
Pastor’s face clawed with sweat streaks
growl flinging spit and cracking
like guitar distortion
around you raised hands trembling
and praising your condemnation
Yes Lord’s and Hallelujah’s
quivering over cymbal crashes
feet stomping merciless
between the hardwood pews
Blood Songs and other Poems
We pretend we own the island.
We build malls where sugar once sang in the air,
boardwalks where fishermen once fixed their battered nets.
But the beasts remember.
Even now, under the new hotels, the new laws,
the old breath of the island stirs.
A wildness we cannot pave over.
A truth older than asphalt.
A kingdom of things that never needed our permission.
For Alton Ellis and other Poems
talking poetry, telling you about graduate studies timelines
and fiscal allocations across national gender bureaux
had i pretended you were just some summer fantasy
i wouldn’t have broken my promise of
writing you letters on colonial postcards
we exchanged for coins in Bookland
An Abecedarian Cut in Half Like a Nose, Godna, 1947
women’s noses began screaming out of barrack windows, a cutlass would wreak havoc,/
x’s marked spots like tainted treasure on their face and arms, some deities go to jail
Two Poems About Love
he, lifting off the book that had dropped, covers upward,/splayed on the breast of the woman sleeping;/bookmarking the page; turning, till it clicks,/the knob of the bedside lamp; pausing a moment/to be sure to not wake her in the breath-held dimness
To Talk of Trees, Cannon Ball Tree, Bloody Orange
In times like these/it is urgent to talk of trees:/the long-memory olive,/the disconsolate orange,/the bullish pomegranate.
There is only wailing, The first cries & Inheritance
But my father knew well how to dodge me,/from I was knee high till the last time/we sat on the concrete, his face wet and wilted/with pleading and pretence, with his fear/of court and child support.
Sovereign
You see it then: the violence of tropical light,
all living things now reduced to chalk outlines against a bruised sky, knuckled
daylong into perfect blue performance. And you too, you realize,
are knuckled, sore with the weight of expectation, pummeled by the script
of nationhood, its exhaustive choreography.
Ailurophilia and Man Killed in Alleged Bird Shooting Accident
RHEA MANLEY Ailurophilia It’s the way how Nancy came in from the back, into the kitchen how our eyes made four as she advanced how I jumped on the counter, bawled out Maya! a cat is coming and she is not afraid. How Maya put...
Day Done Clean
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.
Sheila, the Vanisher
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...
