“It been how long?”
I check my watch. “Twenty, twenty-five minutes.”
“Good. More than one hour and it look bad. After I leave, be ready to give de performance of your life. After you give me de performance of your life.” She drops the colourful lappa. Her body is heaven turned on its head. She picks a truffle from the box and runs it over her lips.
“Don’t,” I rasp.
“Why not? I nah de one who de got nut allergy. Had.” She smiles.
“Why do you make me buy it? You always say it’s too sweet.”
Ciatta shrugs. “What woman can ever be too sweet?” The finger with the little red heart crooks at me again.
I’m going to hell a thousand, blissful times over.
Rachel Eliza Griffiths
An American poet and artist, her collections of poetry include Miracle Arrythmia (2010), The Requited Distance (2011), Mule & Pear (2011), and Lighting the Shadow (2015), which was a finalist for the 2015 Balcones Poetry Prize and the 2016 Phillis Wheatley Book Award in Poetry. Her literary and visual art has appeared widely in publications including the New York Times, the New Yorker, The Progressive, Tin House, and Virginia Quarterly Review. Her video series of contemporary poets, P.O.P (Poets on Poetry), is featured online at the Academy of American Poets. Currently, Griffiths is working on her first novel. She teaches creative writing at Sarah Lawrence College and lives in New York City.
Chosen Family
When you find your sisters you’ll still look over your shoulder sometimes
to see if you’re being followed. You’re hoping one or two sisters you don’t
know will want to see where you’re going. When you find your sisters
they won’t ask you where you came from because they’ll already know
& if they don’t they’ll be busy putting good food on your plate & asking you
if you’re hungry or broke. When you find your sisters, your people, they’ll tell you
to use any bathroom you want, marry anybody you want, work side-by-side
together for long hours in close quarters without any fear of being harmed.
When you find your sisters they’ll throw the ball to you, offer you
their love song & say you need to listen to this track & dance with us
whether or not you know all the steps. When you find your sisters
they’ll say Do You Remember & you’ll say Yes until you remember together
the different ways the whole thing happened. When you find your sisters
they’ll say wear whatever you want, wear the tightest dress, wear the pants,
wear your birthday suit. They’ll say we love your skin & drag & natural hair
& we love you naturally so please just live & don’t let anybody kill you
or tell you they’ve killed you & you’re just fine the dead way you are. When you
find your sisters don’t leave them & don’t let them off the hook when they are
in the wrong. When they are trying to take themselves out of the world
lay your hands on them & call them yours & yours & yours.
When you find your sisters be sure you’ve been preparing your heart
the entire way by loving your difficult self & what you pretend you don’t know
but you do know so that when you see them smiling into your eyes, the soft
or tough flags of their hands covering yours in a truth so light & fierce you see
you all have been midair for some time & could go higher & burn some shit up
if you remembered what else is good everywhere
& everywhere you look.
Cathedral of the Snake and Saint
(for my mother and Maya Angelou who died two months apart)
Riverside Church in September one sunlit morning we gathered
to sing farewell to our sister, beloved poet, our warrior
from St Louis, raised in Stamps by her grandmother.
I thought it was too soon for me to go into a church. I wasn’t civil
yet. I still crossed the street whenever I saw a sanctuary.
Then I would find myself, as if I had no luck, no choice,
crossing back again, searching for a quarter in my pocket or purse.
I would always light a candle. Couldn’t bear to think
that if I didn’t say a prayer what my dead mother might say or do.
& what she would have done that day (laughed & laughed)
to see her snake-headed daughter clapping & crying too loud,
carrying on like I was homeless, with a grief
only a god could wrestle from my soul. I shivered
on the white tongue of the holy spirit. Our people screamed
her name in the hollows. Maya Maya Maya
while she rose up & flew with wings so wide I was cold
from the brilliant shade they made. Indolent black angel
risen from her cage. There was that. But the singing. The singing!
I was shouting so wild & sad when Guy spoke at the finale
that the zipper of my dress snapped. My back exposed
right down to the black waistband of my panties.
The man behind me made a noise. I sat down fast in the dress
I’d worn to my mother’s funeral. My good black dress with its snakeskin
panel down the front. A dress appropriate yet not animal enough.
I found it a few minutes after I chose my mother’s burial suit,
an ivory Calvin Klein jacket & skirt. Feather-grey camisole.
Remembered once my mother said Nobody will give you the skin
off their back but me. I’m always going to love you. Because I’m your mother.
But that morning I died again in the pew. God against my skin, burning.
My entire body published like an unfinished deed to something, someone
I no longer owned. Clothed in her own grief, my best friend
could not give me her jacket. Could not allow the eyes of summer
to glare at her soft brown arms. Could not protect me
from the beak of death that still had not had enough (of me).
I rushed to the back of Riverside Church & flattened myself
against a pillar of stone. Wondered what would happen
if I started to hiss, go black upon my belly with my mournful fangs.
Friends went by, hugging & smiling after the tribute ended.
I could not move. Hugged nothing but stone. Too mad to cry.
Nothing between me & my God. Flesh, stone, immediate shame.
There went the great bright flock. Valerie Simpson who tore it up
earlier while performing I’m Every Woman. There was Toni
waving in a fine straw hat. & Nikki Giovanni & Hillary Clinton & Marie & Jenisha. Then me, barely me, there against the stone, pinned
like a long, empty black tube of skin. I almost stepped right out of
the dead dress & why not? Again the edge of my mother’s casket pulled
against the silk now split & hysterical. Everything ugly & sweet of me
exposed to the heavens. So funny I hoped Saint Maya would thank me
in her throaty chuckle, would hold me in her arms & promise
I Believe You Can Save Yourself.
Seeing the Body
She died & I—
In the spring of her blood. I remember
my mother’s first injury. The surprise of unborn
petals curling light, red, around her wrist.
Some fruit she cut, some onion, some
body with skin & seeds. She fed me.
She listened & I—
She held We & I—
She kept speaking with those flowers
falling from her blood, taking her
across the sky to death. I remember
her voice like a horn I never want
to pull out of my heart. In the next life,
which is here & here, I gat
her every thing
that ever sang my mother’s blues.
She burned & I—
She talked back hard at god.
O, she danced, unbroken, too.
Bale of grief on my back, opening
into something black I wear. A life of flesh
like a petal or fruit or burning.
I’ve carried everything & I’m tired.
She survived & I—
(But she did not live).
She told me Nothing & I—
She was waiting the entire time.
How does the elegy believe me?
Together, we crossed the sky.
There was a gate & we walked through
the world like that.
She wrote We & I—
She was last seen & I—
Eyes, without life, opened eternity.
When the air in her
stopped & I—
She was last seen dying. She was too silent
for the first time in her life. The spring
of my mother’s blood hot & god the dark
dark beyond the closed door
that won’t move again.
Joanne C. Hillhouse
From Antigua and Barbuda, she is the author of two picture books, With Grace, a Caribbean Fairytale (2016) and Lost! A Caribbean Sea Adventure (2017) and its Spanish language edition, ¡perdida! Una Aventura En El Mar Caribe (2018); a teen/young adult novel, Musical Youth, which was a 2014 finalist for the Burt Award for Caribbean Literature; two novellas, The Boy from Willow Bend (2002) and Dancing Nude in the Moonlight (2004), which has been reissued as an anniversary edition with other writings (2014); and a novel, Oh Gad! (2012). She has also been published in a number of journals and anthologies. She freelances full time—writing, editing, training and more. Her passion for writing led her to start the Wadadli Youth Pen Prize to nurture and showcase the literary arts in Antigua and Barbuda.
Evening Ritual
“Emily?”
Veron’s niece, who seemed to have grown again between morning and evening, rushed in just in time to help her put away the last of the groceries. Probably hiding that book she was always writing in, as if Veron didn’t know she kept it stashed between the mattress and the bedspring. Veron sat heavily.
“No, not there,” Veron directed from the dining-chair when Emily opened the fridge. “You know I don’t like my sausage hard and cold. It take out all the spice.”
She signalled for the salami, signalled again for a knife, cut through the plastic to the briny meat, nipped a slice for herself, and another for her niece. Emily hmmmm’d like there was nothing quite so salty and sweet, and Veron hmmmm’d with her. Veron sucked on the casing after the meat was gone, reaching for the knife to cut them both another slice.
“We won’t have any left for tomorrow,” Emily protested.
Veron laughed. “Why leave for tomorrow what you can eat today?” Emily was right though. She directed her to wrap up the rest and stick it in a container in the cupboard.
“What you cook?”
Emily turned from the cupboard, set a fork and plate on the table, then brought the pot over from the stove. A one-pot rice and chicken seasoned with the last of the onion and some spinach plucked from the fence between their yard and the neighbour’s.
“She didn’t see you?” Veron asked, chewing on a piece of the spinach.
Emily shrugged.
“You eat already, right?”
Emily nodded.
Veron grabbed the fork and began eating directly from the pot.
“Auntie Veron!”
“What?” Veron scoffed. “My feet killing me, I don’t need no extra work.”
Veron worked as a waitress at the island’s newest hotel, Sea Grape. Its beach was once popular for its seaside grape trees. Now as bereft of the juicy fruit as it was of locals. People fussed and protested in the beginning. As usual, government did what it wanted. “Politician will full dem belly but smadee ha fu work.” Veron said.
The pay cheque wasn’t much, even with the hotel being so lavish and the owner getting such a long tax holiday he might as well be on permanent vacation. “He red-shenky self,” Veron and most of the staff grumbled behind his back.
“Red shenky” wasn’t usually directed at white people. But “Sir” was local like them, just born on the right side of the whip. When it suited, he played up his island creds, as he stalked the property like a big shot. “Wha’happen, ole bwoy?” “Every t’ing good, sistren?”
At first, the island rooted for him, because black or white, seeing one of their own prosper in an expat industry made them feel like they were inching forward from 1834. He showed them who he was, though, when he cut the pay of those who didn’t come out during the last hurricane. When she and the others had reminded bakkra—that’s how they thought of him now—that the PM, the Met Office, and the media had advised all non-essential workers to remain indoors, he reminded them that tourism was what kept Antigua going. “Nothing tarl more essential than that.” His lips twitched like it was a big joke. And when the union seemed like it wanted to put up a fight, bakkra went on the TV and said anyone who didn’t want to honour their employee contract could leave. Next day, he and the union boss were laughing over Wadadli beers and the catch-of-the-day in one of the hotel’s four restaurants. Veron served them with her own hands. She wanted to spit in their food, but her mother had raised her better than that.
Still, something was better than nothing, she told herself as she hung on. With Emily depending on her, she had to.
Emily had been with her since her sister had decided life was too much and found escape in a bottle. Emily’s father, she called him the sweetie man, because that was all he gave, as if children didn’t have needs day in day out. She remembered cursing both him and her sister to the darkest pits of hell when she discovered the state the now fourteen-year-old girl was in. It had been thanks to a nosy neighbor who’d reported that the child was barely going to school.
She had taken Emily to live with her then. Sat with her over her times tables and spelling words until she had not only caught up but was ahead of everybody. Emily was now an “A” student. A shame about those deep bowlegs, though; she’d never win any beauty contests with those.
“Want me to rub them for you?” Emily asked.
“Hm?” Veron replied.
“Your feet; want me to rub them for you?”
“Giirrl!” As if that was even a question.
The way the hotel was built—on a steep incline sloping down to the beach, so the tourists could have an unobstructed view of the Caribbean sea and the islands beyond—meant a lot of climbing when she was on room-service duty, which she tried to get out of when she could. No tips, rude guests; pass.
“Fix your face,” Emily chuckled. She put on the kettle to heat up the water.
“Mind your mouth,” Veron said, dropping the fork in the empty pot with a clatter. She let out a loud belch.
Emily made a face as she collected the pot and dumped it in the sink.
“What?” Veron said, “The food bang good. Compliments to the chef.”
Emily rolled her eyes, turning back to the stove where the kettle was now whistling stridently.
“Don’t understand how you work in hotel with that kind of behaviour,” she grumbled.
Veron choopsed, “Me in mi home, where me cyan relax and be meself. Ah wha de world! Wha you be, Minister of Etiquette, Ms. Emily Post?”
Her niece could be so prissy sometimes, like someone who grew up in a mansion instead of a ghetto. “Ghetto is a state of mind,” Emily would say whenever the topic came up, “you can have all the money in the world and still be ghetto, and I’m not ghetto.”
Veron would just shake her head, both proud and mystified, thinking: “But where this gyal come from?” This girl, with a book in her hand and her head ever otherwhere seemed sometimes to her as new as when something she didn’t even know she’d planted sprung up from the small patch
of fertile land alongside their house. Their yard didn’t grow much, the soil too tough and unforgiving for that. But there was a patch right at the corner, near the soakaway, where the soil turned easily enough and if she dropped seeds from their meal there, they’d come, all variety of things huddled up to each other like they were seeking shelter from the very rain that would help them grow, the very sunshine that would breathe life into them. Whatever sprang from that patch of dirt was always a nice surprise. Emily was like that.
The kind of girl she didn’t have to check for, no ton of boys fishing around, no fear of picknee pulling down her belly. No, her niece had thoughts in her head, spark in her eyes.
“What homework you have?” Veron asked.
“Just history,” Emily replied.
The girl shoved a bowl of snotty dumms toward her aunt, pulled another chair from the dining-table, seated herself, then lifted her aunt’s feet up and into the pink plastic bath she’d already set between them. The water was more cool than warm but it would do.
“Hm,” Veron moaned, feeling the weariness going out of her through her feet. “Tell me about it,” she said, sucking lazily on the part-sweet, partsour dumms, body going lax, almost like a child needing only a bedtime story to send their heavy-lidded eyes all the way closed.
“Well, Mr B. took us on a field trip today, out to Betty’s Hope, the old sugar estate. It’s kind of boring, to be honest, a lot of grass, and wild plants. That’s where I got the dumms.”
Veron’s eyes snapped open. “Wait, is dead people dumms you have me here eating?” She didn’t spit them out though.
“You want your foot rub or not?” Emily said.
Veron re-settled.
“The buildings are too crumpled to recognize as anything, especially the slave village where there wasn’t no building at all—just grass and cassi . . . and dumms . . .” Emily said.
Veron hmmm’d.
“Yeah, dumms, and goats . . . Was all we could do to get some from the goats . . . or was it the ghosts?”
“Girl.”
“OK, OK . . . there was a restored sugar mill, yes, but it don’t spin or nothing, so that was kinda boring. The thing I found most interesting was the name, Betty; the owner’s daughter apparently. Imagine naming a place like that, a place where you work people until they die, after your daughter.”
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