You’re in your room again jade seven-string
over thigh fingers flying with aban
don over fretboards Look
at you You’re just like Wes doo
doo-doo-doo-doo doodoodoodoo
You learnt that from her the drowning
out learnt it like the alphabet
and walking and curse words
Through the locked door
your father grows siren-loud
You can hear her not talking
and her foot shaking like a hummingbird’s in her sole
hummingbird in her fist clenched to a pulse
hummingbird trembling behind her pursed lips
her grief her heart’s anchor on her gut’s seabed
You grieve her too Smooth and wide-eyed
she was going to go to Paris she told you She stayed
She bought a gold ring She doesn’t wear it anymore
She wore so many beads she doesn’t wear anymore
She rusted them all with dish soap and Clorox
She went with him to Harvard She talked
under the ugly gin-soaked laughter of his friends
Dr and Dr and Dr and Dr (((not the medical kind)))
She talked under Natalie Cole dialed all the way up
between rolled up sedan windows
HUGGINGANDSQUEEZINGANDKISSING
ANDPLEASINGTOGETHERFOREVER
THROUGHEVERWHATEVER
with the bass thick like mucus in her chest
She swelled with you She wouldn’t let you out
so the nurses got a knife to get you out
She sang Isn’t she lovely
to a phlegmchunk pink with throatblood
She shriveled with belly scars and fatigue
crackedpla te scars on her feet
She tripped over mop buckets
to that ugly ugly laughter slicing up
You’re still getting used
to being a wife
Hummingbird hummed
We’ll never get used to it
She stopped talking.
Choiselle Joseph is a writer from Barbados with recent poems published or forthcoming in Rust & Moth, Gone Lawn, and elsewhere. Their current project is Hummingbird, an in-progress chapbook exploring daughterhood through myth and surreal imagery. They are an editor at The Saartjie Journal. INSTA
NEXT >
< BACK
INDEX