The Aftermath of Flight

 

In the dream, I always fly up el Tucuche
to the same house, rusted galvanize roof
folded beneath immortelle and hog plum.

The broken louvres draw me in
like incantation, until I find myself
sitting in a dark room, wings folded

bones still hot in the aftermath of flight.
Someone once told me I was beyond saving.
I remember that now, sitting here

among discarded things from another life.
I walk from room to room, treading
on rotted fruit and crushed flowers

until I come to an old door, painted blue
gasping on its hinges, falling open
to nothingness, where I always wake.

 

Mud

 

After another week of rain
traces of clay linger at the back
of the throat, reminder that we came
from water.

Footprints and tyre tracks bloom
slick and red on concrete.
Morocoy, carried from ravine
by churning currents, crawls
along the road in search
of a home that has already shifted.

The mud both takes and surrenders.
Ankle-deep in clay, I fish for cracked
shells and shards of glass. The backyard
turns up molluscs, rusted metal, old bottles
and a child’s shoe.

Maybe mud is memory. Crustaceans
and earthworms do not forget the seabed.
The road to Mayaro floods with evening tide,
Nariva swamp meets Atlantic
meets the darkening sky.

Dasheen root endures both drought and storm.
Old houses lean into rubble, left to drown.
Moss crawls up galvanize, ferns unfurl
in box drain, stubborn as mud, as animal,
as the desire to build something
time cannot break, to build something
water cannot take.

Everything here is rhizome,
neither rooted nor drifting,
stretching out beneath the surface
with crooked, twisted limbs
to find something like itself.

This town, back pressed to undying bush,
is breathless with algae:
the first animal. Drains do not forget
the river. Brick does not forget
the clay. Pitch does not forget
the lake.

Beneath roads cracking softly, gravel
hillsides whisper as their bodies shift.

Beneath a crosshatch of new pastel houses,
swollen roots break open in loamy silence.

Beneath even that, ammonites
curled in time’s dreamless sleep,
echoing in bone and memory,
all made of the same water,
all stirring with the flood.

 

 

The Land Knows Their Names

 

Under the silk cotton tree
behind the market
in the big drain
among the fish scales

By the river
stones round as mouths
no one heard screaming

In a blue barrel
beneath a parlour
at midday

In the shade of cocoa trees
roots always thirsty

never forgetting
like the mangrove

and the cane again,
always the cane
swallowing names

and the mountain,
spitting up children
like old coins

Behind the school fence
bag unzipped, still wearing one shoe

Along the north coast, water
wringing its hands into forgetting

down a precipice

behind a taxi stand

on the highway

in the quarry

down a ravine

oilfields, among rusted bones

mud eating what won’t burn

savannah, beneath the cannonball tree

the lagoon
(again the lagoon)

in the shallows, in a shroud
in the schoolyard
in the latrine
under galvanize
in an empty lot, in a landfill

Names lodged in the mangrove’s throat
Names in the pitch lake’s unburnable belly
Names in the roots of trees
Names in the lungs of the sea
Names only the land remembers by heart

 

 

∞

Danielle Boodoo-Fortuné is a poet and visual artist from Trinidad and Tobago. Her work has been published in Poetry London, The Rialto, Prairie Schooner, The Asian American Literary Review, Wasafiri, and others. She was awarded the Wasafiri New Writing Prize in 2016 and shortlisted for the Montreal Poetry Prize in 2017 and 2020. Her first collection of poetry, Doe Songs (Peepal Tree Press, 2018) was awarded the 2019 OCM Prize in Caribbean Poetry.