Jaguaripe

39 Myronn Hardy Jaguaripe Everything begins with a hill where a church bar is built a city founded. Our legs thicken to those of mules as we carry clay to the top. The roads rolling down slope into town cobblestones where dirt peaks until the next rain. The pain of place is without end backs mighty as earth. All of this so a girl can sit on her porch a red ribbon in her hair matching her Sunday skirt. She stares at hibiscus yet smells caramel as bees leave one blossom for another. Whose love is this? At the port barnacles attach themselves to the banks. Those eyes see what they want. Crabs the color of fire walk in packs as gulls hover these will not be eaten the blue ones will. A boy throws a bucket with a chicken carcass inside. There is a rope tied to the handle already knotted to the pole where the boy waits. Beneath cobalt water shrimp are clawed torn slowly death visible in transparent bodies. Greedy blue crabs fight over fowl bones as the boy pulls the bucket to the deck. He holds one crab between thumb index 40 Ecotone: reimagining place finger top of the head to abdomen no cuts no blood scented air. Clouds of sugar burnt rose petal waves break at the foot of a white house. That prison of salt where captives were locked flooded. They drowned a wretched eighteenth century. Oh the apparitions above this water. These believers in one dark woman’s quiet decent power see everything. Those with disbelief have taken to the forest as palm-colored lizards blue macaws spider monkeys. Restless sleep or no sleep at all as a boy strokes a wall of that once waterlogged place. He touches his chest. Insides rumble so much so he must rest near a gate infested with moss. He sees girls frolicking in a banana grove. Later men sing play instruments in the general store. An audience gathers perhaps this Sunday is joy silver over a watery crypt. ...