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Valerie Deus
Haiti Unfinished
It’s 4:30am and I can’t write this poem
it’s supposed to be about you buying carrots
but I wanna make popcorn and it’s raining this morning
I want to write you another note about
feeling like a jack-o’-lantern hollow with
the seeds and threads missing
with the soup and the guts gone
there’s no independence day long enough
or revolution deep enough to save me
from writing a poem about watching novelas with your mother
while drinking tea
or picking hazelnuts in her backyard
that would be our weird shadow poem
hiding behind
wanting to write about you going to church
and how little girls’ patent leather shoes
those black shiny shells
those little girl church shoes
look like those big black beetles that make awful noises in the summer
Toussaint—do you hear them up there?
crunching like conch shell suppers
they seem spacious almost
the shoes round and hollow-mouthed
with all the mamas and the buzzing
and the praying built in
except for the catholic stuff
all the kneeling and confession
you can almost see the guilt
that doesn’t seem as spacious or barely a sunflower
Deus / Haiti Unfinished
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