Boa Gravida
by Danielle Boodoo-Fortuné
When we were new,
our love still minnow-soft
and silver, you set their names
like nets along the water’s edge.
Now the first, a son
surfaces, a great fish writhing
in the basket of my hips.
These last gravid days of rain
we digest the remains of years.
You speak of everything to come,
how you long to cradle the lotus-bud
of his skull in the broad leaf of your hand,
to swim in with him from the other side.
Until then, let us wait here in the restless earth,
whisper to each other in mangrove tongues.
Tell me I am beautiful and cold.
I will tell you how thirsty I am
for a mouthful of light.
At night I ache. Veins purple and rise
with this sudden season of blood.
Pelvic plates shift, bones shudder.
I am the great mother boa
turning the soft egg of the world
beneath my ribs. I will tear myself in two
and heal before morning.
Danielle Boodoo-Fortuné is a Trinidadian poet and visual artist. Her work has been featured in the Small Axe Journal, Room Magazine, Cordite Poetry Review, The Literary Review and Poetry London, as well as in the anthology Coming Up Hot: Eight New Poets from the Caribbean. She is the 2012 winner of the Small Axe Poetry Prize, 2015 winner of the Hollick-Arvon Caribbean Writers’ Prize and the 2016 winner of the Wasafari New Writing Prize.