HAITI + THE EGG, THE WISH, AND THE RESOUNDING CRACK

HAITI

Eleven
and all the months were summer

 

 

The night was a great big bug I swallowed
like the woman slipping into my grandfather’s room
Everything was a concrete wall
and nobody ever loved

 

 

For dinner I ate stories
A sun like cigars
Ears buzzing with flies
the low throated thrumming of the generator
I let my stomach beg home through the night

 

 

Once barbed wire trapped me by the hair
I thrashed the long waiting moments
When no one ever comes
I slow the loose ragged tears
and gently strip curl from wire thorn

 

 

Our mother left us there
I assume she was busy spitting out her chest
that wart of her heart

 

 

I spent that eternal summer
watching my grandfather
slam the table with domino tiles
testing its knobbed bent legs

 

 

My cousin brought home two teacup puppies
and I don’t know why she didn’t feed them
they are in general too small to live
and die they did
Having swelled to a red bauble of stomach and ribs
Pissing themselves

 

 

We drove
down the rumble of gray clay
sand that wrecked tires and unsteadied knees
I never knew there was also water
waiting in the pores of my thighs and ankles
we weren’t allowed to drink
the fun colored juice in bright bags
people sold roadside

We’d drive for hours
never getting anywhere

 

 

They told us to tap the younger children
when they were bad
In awe of this new license
my brother slapped the shit out of Pierre Fritz
I remember the laugh burbling out of me
awkward, unsteady, cruel

 

 

The kenép’s dry stone bounced off concrete
I having spat out the unknowable center

 

 

When we returned home at summer’s end
skin raw and dark
our parents retrieved us

 

 

Just as we stepped through the door’s white rim
the altar of longing
I looked back to find my mother
her head locked
by the throat
with his arms

 

 

 

THE EGG, THE WISH, AND THE RESOUNDING CRACK

Like wishbones

we are cracked

between the hands

of two people

We sizzle and sputter

on the driveway

like that one time the eggs

bounced out the trunk

as we opened it and lay dead

on the asphalt

My mother screamed

stricken

for the eggs

cried for them

Her scorn set on my body

like the sun

It was summer

so the eggs fried over easy

in the heat

Heat chokes

corrodes

burns and fries

It spills over our bodies

When I poked the eggs

they bled yellow

My grandmother moved to Florida

for the heat

& her bones

Rickety joints often pop

and sizzle like how

an egg on asphalt falls

with a resounding crack

not unlike the sound of heartbreak

splitting through a desert

You could also say

a body makes a sound

like a crack

when it hits the ground

as does a back

when met

with a force

like a belt

My grandmother

set her scorn to my mother’s

back. That sort of heat

licks the heart. Ridden

on the short end

of a wishing stick

I made sure to watch my step

lest there be a resounding crack

in my mother’s back

Some cracks are heard

around the world

or at least to a mother

something meeting an untimely

hard edge

like the eggs

which bounced and fried

Like the heartbreak

hitting the floor

when my grandmother

laid dead

 

She laid dead

in the heat

in her bathroom

for four days

 

She burned and fried

 

My mother screamed

stricken

She sunk like a wish

before the grave

 

We all die with our ancestors

 

We are all decaying softly

in a condo in Florida

all the time