Salvage: First Place, Poetry

Learning to Swim

Through sluice, flesh emergent, titty mounds, ass wet and roiling beneath spandex. Chlorine slips, pours

into sticky nasal passageways. You, porpoise-smooth, canerows sparkling water jewels. Slick whorls

in the shallow where I am mired. I try, too. String myself across the warm blue, corporeal only for the lungs’ buoyancy,

navel offered to the sky. Rocking embrace, sea moss caress, no tempered azure, lifeguards perched like jumbie

birds. Watching strokes articulated by your body, everything liquid obeys thrust of skin. Plucking wet out the drain

of my ears, we, unafraid of getting blacker, stand on the edge of precipice, sun-dazzled. We throw ourselves in.

Salvage

You never forget the first person who calls you beautiful, without words and means it, from inside salty creases of elbows, lips slow blooming against the back of your knees. He never pressures for more, just the tongue’s lazy mullings, hands afraid to surrender. You are all melongene skin, your hair in box plaits, a teenager. The boy, vein and glinting shoulders, a breath careful careful on your arm. Inside the maxis, your heart is a flycatcher trapped in a house, swooping low from St. Augustine to Petit Valley. Heat sprawled across your face when you walked, as all of your shy unwound itself, littering the roads. You will forget you knew what it’s like to be precious, stunned by the starkness of anyone yearning to drink of you and nourish you well.

Make It So She Never Forget

Phone calls to foreign, Western Union pick-ups. Grabba furrowed into spliff salves, coiled tight, tinged with Dragon Stout. Under dusky canopy of sky, eating memories for comfort.

Nights filtering through latticework, cloaked with skeins of absence. How she’d said, “You want to leave the Caribbean, and I want to go back there. America, wears your soul down.”

In Montego Bay, she culled an ocean from her eyes, her body limp as days-old scallions. So scared to let her go, so angry I had to stay. Coulda never forget her bawling, the room crowded with my name.

Anatomy of Wounds

The first thing is the hand too close to the face, the cutlass voice. The thing rattling, falling out of his chest, the first time he makes you afraid.

No, that’s not the first thing. The first thing was what made you think Who he feel he talking to? It is the thing convincing you that dark black women are made for beating or loving— never both.

One day, you are wet paper, bunched up in a pile to dry. You are a moan on the next, languid, luminous. The first thing collapses in on itself, suppurates.

Yes, you know they say when he hits you the first time, you should leave.

You stay to feel him collect you like fallen rice, hold you like a small child after Shango stomps across the sky.

The first thing is unfurling, membrane-thin, quick, flapping a chorus of sorrys, again and again.

The Remedy

Words unspoken reside in our flesh.

The penis, lay nestled— poised to strike like a cobra.

Except for breaths more urgent than Florida rain, we are quiet.

Just rocking enough to make the bed board hum in tune with despair.

A sad couple fucking is a terrible sight.

Each one picking hurt off the skin, like pieces of lint.

One taking vengeance on the body, the other, swallowing mouthfuls of thorns.

What the Daughter (Un)Made

I mourn unflowered words, unborn children, inside me. —Mahadai Das

She wonders if her mother is sad if her mother’s mother’s mother is also if there is a collective worrying of dark brown hands behind the curtain of the sky.

The mother she is stronger than the daughter in the bottle neck of the waiting room steady, like a silk cotton tree. Or is the daughter stronger than the mother for enduring the careful release?

Striding through caches of patience, she selects necessary amounts for clothes to dry...