Loud Prophecies
(for Juan Dalmau)
I. The Brochure
This morning,
the Gulf gas station
whispers
its way
through
the cinnamon
of someone’s breakfast,
a reminiscence of
an iron pot
carried out through
window screens, onto
mosquito wing, while
in the kitchen,
a lizard's tail
is the only thing
that scurries
along the tile,
the shade
of cracked
things,
quails
eggs,
and river
stones.
II. The Story
Stop right there. Don’t talk to me about how the conquistadors aren’t relevant anymore. Or how the Jones Act doesn’t have its shark teeth eating at my side. Don’t preach the pros of disaster or sell the economies of an anciano’s breath or disregard the parallel rising rates of luxury homes sales and suicides. Just don’t. I am not your plate of rice and beans. I am not your agent of salsa. I am grown from my mother’s tree, her womb a blooming poinciana, roots cracking through to our long story. I am what is left of veteran wars and a soldier’s lonesome return. Made of grave dirt, coaxed from the salts of Salinas, built from the teeth of revolutionaries and their speeches, I am always Guánica hiding a daughter of Benin. Even within this gut, I know where I started: I crawled out of the mush to walk lava roads till all around me turned lush and flourish. I too ate from mountainsides to later slay storms with skin formed by karst and boulders. I stand even here a stone chiseled by a Cagüana, the soft throat of a wave making for home.
You like the coquí?
Its song houses a rebel scream.
How about the sound of the wind against seed pods?
That’s the watery rattle of ghosts.
That machete glaring back?
It’s a body too long in the sun.
What all birthed me:
the radical resilience of aquifers.
We are done
with your politics of gnawing, hawking
your big box stores, boutique cookie chains, and gas stations.
You may think you eat at our table, but you know nothing
about what’s in the pot.
So go ahead, drink your poolside piña coladas
while you dream of what will buy you
a grain of sand.
I’ll be spitting this loud prophecy
of island, spores into the ether, growing
a reverend army.
---
Everywhere the Sun
is a spangled blare. You and I escape like a platoon from
and to what should be shade, but really is a blister of Fahrenheit.
Our fingers burn at the windowsill as we watch the backyard
orchestra of batwing and sparrow searching
for their former homes. Everywhere the sun
skips over rooftops, their FEMA blue
blocks of indigo dipped into laundry. Skipping between the rays
tall as cell towers, our feet scallop the walk, skimming
the limeskin waters of patio grass. But we aren’t children
anymore; there’s bread to find and gas to collect.
Yesterday, we were imps; today we are a wish searching
for its imp. Beneath us, debris gives way
like ice melting
in a cup. But even that is a dream.
There’s no longer any such thing
as ice. Ask the Royal Palms scattered
in the yard like the dead. Don’t we all hold
our hands open, waiting to touch, to be held, to be pulled
away from danger like the generator’s rope start?
We snake a line of cars waiting for what we forget,
our fronds open. Even in sleep the promise
of spewing hydrants, love like the power
of an angled hose. To where do you flee?
How can you turn away from the hiss and sizzle
of lizards’ bellies as they scrape the gutter pipe or the
secret space under the laundry door? We find more drowned
light, a way out; we squint our eyes against climbing, grazing
past what is left of the few dissenting heads of ginger, the fungi
obliterating the Spanish plum, rust as it boils and sweats
in the water heater or the neighbor’s powdered decollete.
___
8/6/2024
Jane Alberdeston Coralin's work has been published in various anthologies and journals, including Paterson Literary Review, Sargasso: A Journal of Caribbean Literature, The Acentos Review, Rock and Sling: A Journal of Witness, and Louisiana Literary Review. Her new novel, Colony 51, is scheduled for release by Jaded Ibis Press. She teaches creative writing at Old Dominion University and is currently working on a new collection of short stories titled Vivid Gods.
