Apparition

By Danielle Boodoo-Fortuné

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There is a woman’s face in that tree
gathering moss along the jawline,
paper nest of wasps in her hair. 
From the half-open back door,
everything is more magical than me.
Ti Mari folds itself in two,
trembling with sunlight, never once
considering what it might mean
to be shut.

Someone once asked, “Will you still write
after the baby is born?” I think about this often,
about the doorway, its rusted hinges,
the one broken latch that rattles,
wrenched daily by small, insistent hands. 
I have been doorway, latch and hinge 
all the things that exist for no purpose
but to open for others. 

It’s always the smallest things
that take up the most space,
seed under leaf, hiding its medicine,
bachac treading back and forth
in overgrown grass until
eventually the path appears. 

I carry it all with me, the right words clenched
between jaws like bitten leaves, wearing
beaten paths from room to room. 
We make space for what we must become
in tightly woven nests of spit and paper,
in termite mounds, secret underground chambers 
where we can grow into ourselves unseen. 

The woman in the tree appears 
to no one but me. Her body rises from the earth
in broad plank roots, winding in ridges beneath
cracked concrete. Her arms keep the earth together. 

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Danielle Boodoo-Fortuné is a poet and visual artist from Trinidad and Tobago. Her work has been published in Poetry London, The Rialto, The Prairie Schooner, The Asian American Literary Review, Wasafiri, and others. 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.

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