Heckling Paradise, and: Anniversaire, and: History Offers No Instruction, and: A Toast

Heckling Paradise

Adam, you remember the zoounmaintained since the fighting,as Abidjan became selectively abandoned?

Remember, in our villages, those cinder-blockhouses unroofed since the economy stalled—weeds grown upinside higher than the walls?

I close my eyes and rearrange what's left here.That Frenchman who belched at the alligators,dragged his Ivorian prostitute away by the hip.

The two lions that rolled their eyes on the brokenconcrete slab as I stuck my hand through the bars.

The monkeys won't even play with themselves. You saidwon't tug their red dicks?

I wanted to rip out my heartand throw it to them.

We joked when the turtle poked its beak through the pond scum,bathtub fart-bubble head.

Would it be too sentimentalto add the civetteprowling with one lost leg? Yet true.You said this all simply:

Life is dangerousunder these blue skies.

And I learned with my slight smile—scuttle, attrition . . . whatever is wild has been wildby a matter of permissions;willingness to hurt and to be hurt.

Consider the turtle, in situ.Hours ferrying itself through loaves of foam,it digs a nesting trench. Back and forth to the surf,staying lubricated as it lays its eggs.

But that's the idea—with the zoo, you're stuck there.

Anniversaire

Rainon the full moon'shigh tide, rainon the bulb of driftwood.

The first timeyou want to hear a voiceany voice will do.

The birdspeck you apart, pole starweightedsomewhere in their guts.

History Offers No Instruction

Slow enough to keep from sweatingbut fast enough to keep the flies off my neckI learned to walk in those years, which were endless years.Mothers yelled, and I woke in the thick heat."Ka dah!" They clapped their buckets down the path.The children peering over my window ledge

dropped in chase. I wiped sleep from the ledgeof my face, rolled onto the concrete sweatingalready. A nannie bleats on this side of the path.Goats' call and response next—Hear the kid's panicked nattering? This heatwill have emptied my water basin, mineral rings like years

of scree marks on an expanding shore, yearsticked like rice across the bottom of a pot. Letyourself watch—Ee dah ka fei blei nah. Eathere with me! Benét will stop. Slosh sweatingdown her bucket, tracing streaks on her neck.From her ears, drops pock dusty leaves. The path

is clogged, Consti and Simone wade a new patharound Benét. Her gaze follows me. Fourteen years—like some purple-winged bird twisting its neckfor my arrival. But I never—until with this ledgerIn courtyards the cacao is spread for "sweating."We only pay for these beans that have dried in the heat.

Once, maybe, I was really there. Above Benét's heart,a pagne knot. And her baby behind bounces over the path."The gendarmes picked on a particular woman andgrabbed her breasts and started pulling her in circles . . . Then told five boys to get an erection and rape the women . . .took their penis in the palm of their hands and hit it,

hard, with the buckle of his belt." Am I, I am, nicked.And you, you've not heard how stout the heat?The new president fumbles the bouchon de liegepromising to outpace the past. A well-heeled path:if intervention, and if traders, if the market bearsthe new labor. As technologies sweeten.

The nurse's wet tin roof. The pump's handle and neck.The glare paints your eyes shut. Years stammer, the heatbreaks—rain stomps that distance back into a single edge.

A Toast

Between each of the streamsthere is a flower.In the sand and gravel

between eachof the nine streamsa flower

for each of the boys,a flower for each of thenine I have become.