Confessor

This is where you leave me. Filling of old salt and ponderous, what’s left of your voice in the air. Blue honeycreeper thrashed out to a ragged wind, whole months spent crawling this white beach raked like a thumb, shucking, swallowing the sea’s benediction, pearled oxides. Out here I am the body invented naked, woman emerging from cold seas, herself the raw eel-froth met beneath her tangles, who must believe with all her puckering holes. What wounds the Poinciana slits forth, what must turn red eventually. The talon-mouths undressing. The cling-cling bird scratching its one message; the arm you broke reset and broke again. Caribbean. Sky a wound I am licking, until I am drawn new as a lamb, helpless in the chicken wire of my sex. I let every stranger in. Watch men change faces with the run-down sun, count fires in the loom-holes of their pickups, lines of rot, studying their scarred window-plagues, nightshade my own throat closed tight against a hard hand. Then all comes mute in my glittering eye. All is knocked back, slick hem-suck of the dark surf, ceramic tiles approaching, the blur of a beard. The white tusk of his ocean goring me. This world unforgiving in its boundaries. The day’s owl and its omen slipping a bright hook into my cheek —