In December 2017 Susumba’s Book Bag sent out a call for submissions under the title of Writing The Storm, guest edited by Shivanee Ramlochan. Having gone through hurricane Maria in September, poetry was a good way to try and work through some of the intense experiences, thoughts and feelings that myself and others had gone through and were still going through.
So grateful to have two of my poems published in Issue 10. Take a read of the whole magazine here, Susumba’s Book Bag Issue 10.
The latest versions of the poems are below.
Disappearing Act
The sulphur and alchemical
rain here can transform things:
copper capped church patinated
forest green, mountains to mud,
people to primal pulp,
personalities split.
I saw it with my own wide eyes,
flaming twin sublimed in torrent,
all matted hair and mucus; tears,
rivulets bleeding blending like
wet windscreen distortion;
drenched merging watercolour.
blinked—
sleight of hand
unseen—
and I
was
gone.
Invoked
Santa Maria! Human you named me, teased me out
from the labyrinth of your Dionysus dreams.
I am your mother
of a hurricane so look now,
intimately into the white cosmic chaos of my cyclops eye; listen
intently to the thundering doom of my clack-clack cloven hooves.
In the folds of my fleeting calm you will
hear me blow up the silence
with maddening whispers whispers whispers.
You will:
try to make light of my dark, drink, laugh out loud, try to drown
me out of your basement—I will flood
you up the streaming stairs, silent—sober;
try to close your heavy shutters and doors against
my whipping my wailing—I will split them like coconuts;
try to protect your children, swaddle them in crook
of your fleshy arm—you
will stifle them all the way to rigor mortis;
smirk, pat your broad back for your safe house—I will trap you for days
inside your mausoleum, force you to loath loved ones
unburied bodies on your bloody marble kitchen table;
cling onto the door of your en-suite bathroom,
concrete sealed—in two ferocious shakes
you will shiver, stare into a void, unhinged;
try to seek shelter, a firm piece of ground to anchor
yourself—I will chew off each of your seven covers, spittle them on ribs
of flamboyant trees and bury you nude in red-brown putrid mud.
Your rapacious black and white cat will saber-tooth your tongue down to a stump,
claw out and play with your tonsils; your gold-chained pit bull will
suck all grey-gloom night on your red-rich rawboned marrow.
When I leave, for all I know, for all I care,
you will seek to solve my riddle in rubble, ask why—
my mayhem will be a lunatics mystery,
pressure popping hurricane tied roofs but fluttering over nailed tin on shack;
crushing crystal caressing calabash.
My wings are not of doves but black as Badb,
my feathers not light but dense as tar,
talons diabolical.
There will be no olive-green foliage left
to hide behind peace
of mind.
I will turn you loose.
I will tornado you out
of your right mind.
I will leave you leave you
leave you with nothing
worth saving—
Thy. Will.
Be. Done!
Look up at this black tarpaulin sky: look into
this moon, these stars, your only guiding lights now.
—
In the miraculous morning, home intact, my daughter burst
open her heavy eyes and our
swelled shutters and doors—stared, pointed
at the flogged and naked, phantom trees;
brutally splintered limbs pointing all
over; black hollow knots in white tortured trunks mouthing—the horror.
There is a toothless guabancex-grinning woman
called Mad Maria, living under a bus shelter in a
now bare-bone village. She spins
out skeletal arms and cackles
when they still tease, call her name,
relentlessly.
I gifted my daughter the family name
Maria. She struck on her 13th birthday.
She sang hauntingly with eyes closed the
whole crashing night till dawn. I did not know
her words but metronomed with castanet
teeth and knocking knees.
Careful…
Maria Maria Maria—
collateral beauty—
bacchanal spirit—
exposed
we hope
we may not re-cover.
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