2 poems by Danielle Boodoo-Fortuné

Vervine Tea

You were expecting something beautiful,

forgetting how easily small flowers bruise.

It’s true, nothing looks the same once it has been broken.

You strip the stalk beneath cool running water,

thank the roots, rub dirt from mottled leaves.

You bring leaves to a rolling boil until water blooms

until the kitchen is thick with green ghosts.

Much as you ache, no grandmother appears to anoint head

and bind hips. You sit alone in the rising steam, leaking rivers.

The sea has ebbed now, and you are only clay and salt.

Steep yourself in silence. No prayers

stir the air, only the soft hum of your breath.

Fear kneels beside you like a midwife,

tending each hour, each fraying strand of pain.

The baby sleeps against the hot lightning of your chest

fascia and bone flaring, your core a cavern echoing

currents of blood and loss. His breathing echoes in the dark.

Alone, you oil the silvering fault lines of your belly,

murmur prayers to a god who has been torn, same as you.

The Body Is No Barrier

I read that our bodies are filled

with microplastics, about a teaspoon per brain

bright filaments threaded into

knotted gray matter, fragments

lodged in the memory, slivers

of wrappers working their way

into the amygdala,

that dark little room where panic sleeps.

Perhaps my body is no barrier. I no longer

know where I end and disorder begins

and if the world is broken

beyond repair, then so am I,

all the gods in my cells

wrestling with polypropylene,

from the chimeric gods of childbirth

to the tiny deities

that crossed the sea-bridge

of my grandmother’s marrow.

My friends are afraid of bringing children

into the world. I understand why.

Most days, electric fear beats its way

through the corridors of my nerves

an old beast thrashing in my mind’s silt

half drowned in fossil fuels.

No matter what I tell my children

about the providence of earth

not even stars in the belly of space

are free of greed

the desperate gravity

of our loneliness and hunger.

Still, I sing to them, balanced

on the frayed edge of a small map

in this small place,

chest-deep in oceanic sleep.

I sing to them, mouth full of seawater and brain full of plastic

not knowing where I end and the world begins.

The future is a snarled fishing line

regret passed down in chemical whispers.

I think of this

as I rub balm on their chests,

as though I have not been spoon feeding sorrow

to the future’s mouth with my own hands

for what is a body but memory made flesh,

what is memory, when it can never decay?

_______________________

Danielle Boodoo-Fortuné is a poet and visual artist from Trinidad and Tobago. Her work has been published in Poetry London, The Rialto and many other journals. She was awarded the Wasafiri New Writing Prize in 2016, and shortlisted for the Montreal Poetry Prize in 2017 and 2020. Her first collection of poetry, Doe Songs (Peepal Tree Press, 2018) was awarded the OCM Prize in Caribbean Poetry.