Anne Bonny Marooned with Child
- Anne Bonny Marooned with Child
When he left you, you sat in the surf a day and night, let the lap of Caribbean
obscure your thighs, let the minnows run their purple races across your thighs and finches
tear red cords from your scalp. You hoped the fists in your belly would unclench,
cease their restless tumble and let you bleed into green sea. He has left you with his mistress.
Mornings you are up before her stained aprons and crushed cheeks and gamboling brood,
to prowl with cutlass, bash the stalks of bamboo that spring to defend savory
corners of this island: inlets clutched with oysters, nests of neat-grouped eggs. You bring
each step down hard to dislodge this nine month knot that marooned you in stinking hovel, nothing to steal
but the hours between tides when none but you can stand outdoors — the absence of breeze that draws [End Page 323]
the flies and mosquitoes to feast on your dead man’s feet, your cursed belly. You’ve given thought to opening
him across the hips when he returns, to slick the deck with the squalid red he keeps so precious,
those gooey thickets beneath graying flesh, sunken depths of the body he’s never had to share. [End Page 324]
dorsey craft holds degrees from Clemson University and McNeese State University. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Crab Orchard Review, Fifth Wednesday Journal, Mid-American Review, Notre Dame Review, Rhino Poetry, and elsewhere. She is currently a PhD student in poetry at Florida State and the assistant poetry editor of Southeast Review.
