yellowbouganvilla
The neighbors play reggae sometimes so that some days, with my curtains drawn and the blue light pooling in through the blinds I can hear a song about waiting in vain through the tinny distance like in that little corner store back on the island with the smell of molasses in the barrel and that radio on the shelf struggling with Bob Marley's voice trembling out with the crooning shopkeeper whose face I've forgotten.
is your breath pluming on the air in what is almost February but January still at maybe two in the morning on a street corner with your bed three blocks behind you because under your sheets is nothing but your own uncomfortable, agonized company in the moments before sleep.
I like those pastel pink boxes that pastries come in and the feel of sleep in a long car ride. I like the sound of a wrench turning a nut on a bolt. I like those tiny, dark islands scattered at the curve of your neck and how I know them, raised ever so slightly, when I feel you in the dark.
You get the feeling you know who you are. You get righteous and indignant about shit you believe in and what you will and will never do. But goddamn take a look at your empty bank account and your empty fridge and all the shit you've already paid for and the shit still waiting for your money and see what hunger pains and a looming rent date will give birth to. You aren't born anew; you just go back to you.
Days like a heel grinding bones to dust; all the parts feel dispersed or like a skylark plucked. Et la tête, et le cou, et le dos, et les pattes. "Je te plumerai la tête," croons the morning, pressing down. "Alouette, gentille Alouette," it sings come noon. "Alouette, je te plumerai." And my head, and my head---those slim heels at the temple.
On her way to the hairdresser she unearths the bandana's; rich silks and satins in plain and paisley to hide the kinks coming through the perm.
Down by the vents, where mountain-ranges lay cold and obscured, the water must whoosh and beat like a womb; sightless as the womb too, but for the flashes of blues and reds and greens bright like lightening bugs gliding by the windows on a July night. I like the stranger colors that blip in and out of the dark most; those persimmon and bottle-green lights whirring in the tendrils shifting soft as soot, an infinitesimal quickening in the cradle of the world.
Iron In Her
When my father was a child
his mother rushed him and
my aunt and uncle into the wild
of the nighttime streets
leading to the border
and away from the war
at their feet.
Sometimes I dream of her
sitting by their beds
where they would stir
restless with the sound
of constant planes
baying like hounds
with the scent
of her children
curled and bent
in dread,
even in sleep.
Here in my mind
she does not weep;
she straightens her spine
and see's the road at nighttime.
There is a steady, purposeful thump thumping of a bed in the apartment above me and each knock of what sounds like a metal frame against the walls that share everything is accompanied by a this high, sweet whine that presses a throb, a shiver, down in the very seam of me.
So that he could teach me how to float, my father brought me to the calm, shallow water of Fisherman's Beach, fingertips reassuring at my back. A fishing boat whirred by somewhere out on deeper water and the sky was as smooth and spotless as river stones when he pulled his hand away; I felt the cool darkness shifting down there below me. "Easy," he said, voice soft.