Insect Primer
What strange inheritance
makes one eight-year old
girl
say to another, Let’s
take off
all our clothes and
pretend. I’ll be the man
and come home angry.
Real angry. Now spread your legs.
Dulcimer dragonflies–––
one copper girl and her silver friend,
on the queen-size pond of
a bed.
Dragonflies can take off
backwards.
Dragonflies in wheel position are
mating.
The
vortex of a dragonfly’s wings is
proportional
to a hurricane.
It hurts. Love hurts.
It hurts. It’s supposed to hurt
more
the first girl instructs–––her voice
less
like a vortex of wings on
summer-ripe peaches, bit
more like the season’s
first fruit, brought
hard to the mouth too
soon, more
stone than sweet, not yet
ripe,
not yet intended to
register pleasure.
Dragonflies have 360º vision.
Dragonflies are
predators.
What slack water will the
second girl recall
when she rises from this
bed?
Undressing The River III
And we walk–––
as if from the
long horn,
the rattle-gourd, the carnival of
memory–––
a two-girl crowd jostling the
jagged slope.
Towels twisted at our hips, like
Creole skirts,
festoon our buttocks, boasting a
riotous Hibiscus
the cow’s knowing walk.” Her
basso
profundo
figure eight’s. Sly feet
samba’s staggering ship’s sway;
and
in homage to our Kalinago kin,
water-wise,
who knew how to transform, with
fire,
tree into boat and rode the salt
off Waitukubuli’s volcanic coast
long before Yemaya drowned here
so home extended beyond the
black-
ribboned hem of Our Tall Mother’s
skirt
to include Kalinago villages on
Guadelupe,
Martinique,
Saint Lucia (now Creole names all?)
Conde’s home, Césaire’s home,
Walcott’s home:
“Look, Cousin, we are cousin to
this all.”
Come. Leh we brave
Canefield River ’s uphill course.
Our transient feet–––tender,
unaccustomed,
getting stronger to find the
place
where the Red Rock promises a
pool
-one extended mountain stanza-
to let one’s body in.
|
Nehassaiu
deGannes’ poems have appeared in Tuesday
Journal, Callaloo, PoemMemoirStory,
Caribbean Writer, American Poetry
Review, Painted Bride Quarterly and
the anthology After Shocks. Awards
include The Philbrick Prize for her chapbook,
Percussion Salt & Honey, the 2008 Poetry
Fellowship from the Rhode Island State Council
on the Arts and the 2009/10 Cave Canem
Fellowship to the Vermont Studio Center. Past
fellowships include SVCW and Soul Mountain.
Nehassaiu has work forthcoming in
Encyclopedia Project, and her one-woman show
Door of No Return will receive a
commissioned bilingual French/English premiere
in Montreal in March 2010. Nehassaiu holds an
MFA from Brown University, is a Cave Canem
Fellow and currently Assistant Professor of
Theatre at Rhode Island College. She divides her
time between Providence and Harlem.
www.nehassaiu.com