On these streets, flanked by row houses
I march from A to B
through an hour’s oppressive
cold. Then, sudden, potent

as a heaviness thrown: the musk smell of him
blue hills, the hue of those evenings
smoky white and indigo. He and I
beneath a streaked melancholic sky, walking

first on soft pitch, then where the paved road slips
with a kissing of teeth into dirt.

The shop at the corner: navy-blue, mottled – there
we would stop to cool parched throats
and calm our anxiousness.

I see our outsize shadows occupy that darkness:
recede and lunge.

There was other life on that road: glimpses
of navy blue uniforms
heart-shade and -shape of anthurium

and old men coming through the dark
with voices cracked like enamel cups.

But, I was filled with the greenness of him
and our only ambition – that room
where it was its own quiet dusk and we
fireflies dancing into the dark.

 

∞

Jannine Horsford is a fellow of the Corsicana Artist and Writer Residency 2024, the inaugural Moko Magazine Poetry Masterclass in 2018, the 201 Callaloo Writers’ Workshop, and the Cropper Foundation Caribbean Writers’ Workshop. She was a recipient of a Bocas Emerging Writers Fellowship for 2022. This poem is taken from her chapbook Jurassic Coast, published in Port of Spain in 2024 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 2022 Bocas Fellowships were one-time awards to support early-career Caribbean writers as they advanced book manuscripts, made possible by donations from Canisia Lubrin, Dionne Brand, Christina Sharpe and Allyson Holder.