after scrubbing garden tiles
helpers disrupt / hot sun servitude / sing gospel / dream parliaments
of rakes and brooms

on the bus stand
a school girl bleeds / grips the blade in her pocket / she believes blisters
by her own hands are better

i’m warned
not to walk by gullies / where chests raise / breathe relief when barrels clear
xxxxxxxxxi go there / for the air
bullets at the centre of causes / sink lineages draped in white sheets /
another war happens / over electricity lines and food / the body amends /
night is a little church

sleep well, Kingston

had my father delivered / the nation on his tongue when he stooped to speak /
love would hold / me / out of shadows / the mute comrade appears /
in a Kariba suit

 

∞

amílcar peter sanatan is an interdisciplinary Caribbean artist, educator and activist from Trinidad and Tobago. He is an alumnus of the Cropper Foundation and Obsidian Foundation writers’ residencies and was a Promundo Writing Fellow. A 2024 Bocas Breakthrough Fellow, who used that experience to advance a full-length poetry collection, this poem is taken from his chapbook, About Kingston, published in Port of Spain in 2025 by Peekash Press, the imprint begun as a partnership between Peepal Tree Press and Akashic Books in 2014, now administered by the Bocas Lit Fest. The 2024 Bocas fellowships were awarded to early career writers to support them in advancing their fiction or poetry debuts, with funding from UNESCO, Caricom, UWI, the EU, and the ACP, under the Creative Caribbean joint project.