[Friends]

The following is now open for applications — the Eccles Centre & Hay Festival Writer’s Award 2022 at the British Library (deadline September 16^th). Authors are invited to apply for works in progress of either fiction or non-fiction that would benefit from research in the British Library’s Americas collections (defined as US, Canada, Central and South America and the Caribbean), written in English or the Latin American languages.

Applicants are expected to make extensive use of the British Library’s Americas collections and curatorial support via a one-year research residency to develop their idea. Each of the two winners will receive £20,000 and special access to the Eccles Centre Platform at Hay Festival events, as well as the events programme at the British Library, to promote their published work.

The 2021 Award holders are Pola Oloixarac and Imaobong Umoren, who are working on their forthcoming books, LITERARY ATLAS OF THE AMAZON and EMPIRE WITHOUT END.

You can find out more about past winners, eligibility and the application process here and the online submission form here.

[Friends]

2021 Wasafiri Essay Prize is open for submissions!

http://www.wasafiri.org/ submit

[Friends]

Friends, it’s the very final week of the Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize!

Deadine alert! The 2021 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize closes on 31 May. Submit! Prizes include £1,000, publication, mentoring, and more. https://www.wasafiri.<wbr>org/new-writing-prize/ @wasafi<wbr style=”font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit;”>rimag

Enter the 2021 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize

Multiply-award-winning international judging panel comprising Tishani Doshi (Poetry), Hirsh Sawhney (Fiction), and Christie Watson (Life Writing), chaired by renowned novelist and Professor of Creative Writing Andrew Cowan.

Prizes of £1,000 each to be awarded to the best new writers of fiction, life writing, and poetry.

Additional awards of Chapter and Verse/Free Reads mentoring from The Literary Consultancy where eligible.

1:1 mentoring session with The Good Literary Agency’s Nikesh Shukla for each shortlisted writer.

Open to all writers who haven’t yet published a book-length work regardless of age, gender, nationality, or background.

Closing 31 May 2021 at 5pm BST

Previous winners of the prize have scored deals for their debuts with with Virago, Verso, Bloomsbury, Peepal Tree Press, and many more. They have gone on to win or be shortlisted for prizes including the Poetry London competition, the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Galley Beggar Press Short Story Prize, The White Review Short Story Prize, Ambit Short Fiction, OCM Bocas Poetry Prize, the Edge Hill Prize, and the Guyana Prize for Literature. The Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize is an invaluable springboard for writers’ careers.

Enter here: https://www.wasafiri.<wbr>org/new-writing-prize/

[Friends]

A poem by Cindy Jiménez-Vera
From the anthology The Sea Needs No Ornament/El Mar No Necesita Ornamento, edited and translated by Loretta Collins Klobah and Maria Grau Perejoan
Published June 2020 by Peepal Tree Press

STILL LIFE

Select a simple object,
like the fingernails of your dead mother.

When you have chosen the object,
place it on a table or on the floor.
Sometimes, the object is located in a casket.
In such cases, there isn’t an option.

Make sure there is a source of direct light.
Funeral parlour lamps can work.
If no electric power is available,
bring a candle and a box of matches to light it.

Gaze closely at the object.
Take six minutes.
That’s enough time for you to believe it.
The one who lies in the coffin
gave you life a few years ago.
Very few. Maybe less than what you have left.

Begin to draw the object,
starting with any part
that makes you feel comfortable:
the plate, cuticle, lunula,
or side walls of the nail.
Avoid drawing the matrix.
It’s the living and most important part.
The nail matrix produces healthy cells
— that’s why nails of the dead keep growing in the grave —
and the object that we have to draw
must be completely inanimate.

After shading the nails with graphite
or with the technique of your preference, add details:
stains, chips, flecks of polish, grime.

Rest when needed,
it’s a process that takes time.
Think about the trees she planted with these nails.
Did they just grow from one day to the next?

When you finish the drawing, observe it closely.
Keep practising.

[Friends]

A poem from La ciencia de las despedidas (The Science of Departures), by Adalber Salas Hernández, translated by Robin Myers

THE CONFERENCE OF THE BIRDS

In the middle of the Nasrid Palace is a
rectangular room, roofless, whose name
escapes me. Placid stone now dominating
no one, with a pond as brief
as a navel, like a single eye, like
a water-mouth mid-yawn. I sit on
the stairs, crushed by this heat that
hollows out the bones and carves them into flutes, surrounded
by tourists from Asia and Eastern Europe,
all frantic and overheated. Above
us, dozens of swifts cut across
the narrow air, cheeping, deafening the
walls and the clicking cameras and the hubbub,
sealing off the whole summer with that single voice made
of knives, tiles, intangible ink, the wind’s
tendons, as if trying to teach
a lesson, a revelation to the clammy
bodies that will wander here all afternoon and then
go home, show photos to their
families, and describe a building
ridden with birds — concluding, perhaps,
that the first man was not in fact
the first man, but barely a journey, a little
path grooved with blood and bile and marrow vivid
as sundown in August,
and that the first bird wasn’t the first
bird, but a sound collected into the density
of flight, and that between the two is just
the headless clarity of this day. But maybe they
don’t mean any of this. Maybe they’re content
to fly from crack to crack, hovering up above,
where eternity is another untamed animal.
I sit there and the swifts and tourists pass me by.
Their happy calls are unbaptised children.

EL COLOQUIO DE LOS PÁJAROS

En medio del Palacio de los Nazaríes, una
estancia rectangular, sin techo, cuyo nombre
se me escapa. Piedra mansa que ya
no tiene señorío sobre nadie, con un estanque breve
como ombligo, como ojo único, como
boca en pleno bostezo de agua. Me siento en
las escaleras, aplastado por este calor que
ahueca los huesos y los vuelve flautas, rodeado
de turistas venidos de Asia o Europa del Este,
insolados y frenéticos. Por encima
de nosotros, decenas de vencejos atraviesan
piando el aire estrecho, ensordeciendo las
paredes y el clic de las cámaras y el bullicio,
tapando el verano entero con esa sola voz hecha
de cuchillos, tejas, tinta impalpable, los
tendones del viento, como queriendo impartir
una lección, una revelación a los cuerpos
sudorosos que pasarán aquí la tarde y
volverán a casa, mostrarán las fotos a sus
familiares y les hablarán de un edificio
infestado de pájaros, una lección que
enseña, quizás, que el primer hombre no era
el primer hombre, sino un recorrido apenas, una
vía estriada de sangre y bilis y médula fulgurante
como un atardecer de agosto,
y que el primer pájaro no era el primer
pájaro, sino un sonido amasado hasta el espesor
de la fuga, y que entre uno y otro sólo cabe
la claridad sin cabeza de este día. Pero capaz no
quieren decir nada de esto; capaz se contentan
con volar de grieta en grieta, permaneciendo allá arriba,
donde la eternidad es otro animal por domesticar.
Me quedo sentado mientras pasan vencejos y turistas.
Sus gritos contentos son niños sin bautizar.

[Friends]

An excerpt from the chapbook Letters to K, by Anu Lakhan
Published 2018 by Argotiers Press

Dear Madam,

We are in receipt of your letter, dated __ June 2008. Regrettably, we are unable to provide any assistance that would allow you to initiate correspondence with Herr Doktor Kafka.
Since, in your letter to us, it appears the notion of his demise is not unfamiliar to you, perhaps our response has been anticipated and will not prove too great a disappointment.
We hope this will not curtail your enjoyment of his writing or the works of any other writers, living or deceased, who we have the privilege to represent.

Best regards,

X___________

•

Dear Herr Kafka,

Thank you for your timely death. If you were alive I’m quite sure I wouldn’t have the courage to write to you. I’m equally sure I would not have your real address, since publishers have a reputation for withholding such information. In your case, the quest would have been especially problematic since your publishers are somewhat stupid.
To what I considered a polite and necessary letter, asking them if they thought you would be amenable to my communication, I received an idiotic response meant — as far as I can tell — to make sure I continue to buy your books.
So here I am, rather illogically writing to ask if I may write to you in the future. Clearly ridiculous, since I am already writing to you. Also ridiculous since I can expect no evidence of acceptance or refusal. All the same, it seems only good manners. I live in an indelicate time when people take great liberties in addressing strangers. We give no thought as to the desire of the other party to be so afflicted.
I am not yet sure what will help me decide if I may continue to write. But I do want to, so very much.
Thank you for your attention.

Best regards,
J____ L_____

•

Dear Herr Kafka,

I don’t much go in for signs or astrological forecasts or things like that, so I can’t wait for any such guidance on whether or not it would be acceptable to write to you. Yesterday, however, while visiting my parents, I saw a scrap of paper as it wafted down from the hall table. It said, “Franz called. Said he’d call back.” No indication as to who it was for. I am not aware of any friends of my parents of that name, but my ignorance in this matter does not make the existence of the note any less real. Since all I have is a very arbitrary set of personal rules of interpretation (which, as a matter of course, I apply very arbitrarily), then this is all the counsel I can expect: my own, fed on less than nothing.
I have decided to write.
Things — as things are wont to do — are likely to take a different turn (that is to say, I am likely to think otherwise for no clear reason), but while I have it in mind, I thought you might like to know some of the things I am hoping we can discuss. Well, not discuss exactly. You know what I mean.
So, I said to myself, “Self, think about this. You have not chosen to write to someone you know personally. Not someone you can possibly meet. You have not even opted for an easy-going dead person. What are you going to say to him? What do you want to know?”
I’ve made a list; here is a bit of what I want to say:

1. I understand.
2. I don’t understand.
3. You must have been beautiful because everything you said was true.
4. I too am tired and often unwell.
5. The world is squalid.
6. Thank you for being born before me and writing it all so I need not feel so alone now.
7. I’m angry you were not born closer to my time so that I need not feel alone so often.
8. I’m sure you had beautiful hands.
9. Did you play the piano at all?
10. You had such a bad habit of getting engaged. If you’d been with me, I’d have discouraged that kind of behaviour. Maybe, eventually, we could have moved in together, never with any talk of marriage. Sometimes that’s what does a person in — the idea of that step. If you ignore the step entirely and move straight into the gentle, intimate, comforting domesticity, you might be OK.
11. Would I have been willing to live in a very cold place for you?
12. Maybe, in getting to know each other, we would have come to accept that we were so fundamentally lonely that not even the presence of the other could change it. There might have been some comfort in the understanding.
13. I doubt we would have had similar taste in furniture.

I’m very keen to start on the furniture.

Best regards,
J____ L_____

•

Dear Sir,

(Who am I kidding? I don’t speak German. I thought I’d give the salutation bit a go, but it’s no good. I’ve always been embarrassed by my attempts to communicate in another language when I’m travelling. Best to admit the failure before the test.)
I’ve spent all this time thinking about why I’m writing to you and not considered how these letters might be interpreted. However unlikely my chances of success, now that I have thought of it, I feel I must try to reassure you on a few matters:

1. I am not trying to elevate myself in the literary world.
2. I am not delusional. I mean it when I say I know you are dead. I don’t fancy I’m playing along with some quirk of yours.
3. I do not imagine I am a character in one of your stories.
4. Though in my previous letter I spoke of ways in which a romantic relationship between us might have worked, please know that that was purely theoretical. My intentions are entirely platonic. I think.

As you see, I am fond of lists. My life doesn’t boast of much else that suggests order or structure.
About my writing to you, it is not a complex matter, only this: it makes me feel less alone. I have not read many of your books. I do not think I understand you so well as to imagine a compatibility of minds. It is, as I said, a feeling. I don’t have them often. I mean, of course I often have feelings, I always have feelings, but what I mean is this: this way I feel with regard to you is especially strong and has been so for a very long time. That is the thing that doesn’t happen often. Of course, all my strong feelings don’t have to do with you, so that too is not quite how I meant to say it. If I had any sense or much by the way of pride, I’d tear this up and start over, but I’m starting to run out of paper. Really, I should have known. I know what I’m like, how difficult this would be. I should have gone out and bought a dozen yellow legal pads (which, by the way, is what I write to you on), but it is nearly two in the morning and I do not live in a place where stores stay open all night thinking how they can best serve the needs of insomniac letter writers.
There’s more: I apologise in advance. (I once thought I could safely practice great economy of words with no loss of meaning by simply contracting my vocabulary to the phrase “I’m sorry.” I can hardly think of a situation in which that will not cover most of what I mean.) Yes, I write to you because it makes me feel less alone. I know too, that it is sometimes more important for a person to say a thing than it is for another person to hear it. I am being very forward. I’m sorry. I cannot think what else to do. The thing is, my wanting to write to you — to you, you understand, not just anybody — has become something obsessive. It is a very lucky thing you are not alive, or I might be tempted to move from the relative safety of paper to lurking outside your gate. Does it help at all if I assure you that, even if it had come to that, I would never — never — have had the courage to approach you? To open the gate and ring the doorbell. To stand on the top step and wait while someone told you a strange woman was at the door, and to strain to listen for the interval between the delivery of the message and your nervous but definite refusal to see me. No, it could never have come to that. Still, it is one less thing to keep me up at night, knowing you are safely dead and not likely to feel in any way threatened by me. My cowardice, your not being alive, and the fact that even if you were I can’t see that I’d be able to afford trips to Prague, have conspired to keep us both safe and sane.
Now, why do you make me feel less lonely? (There, it’s been said. It is not simply “alone” but its more cruel sibling “lonely” that I tend to feel, and feel less so with you.) Because I think you would understand that loneliness comes at you regardless of circumstances that suggest the constant, almost oppressive company of others. I think you know that the fundamentally lonely person will be that no matter what comes her way.
I have seen only one picture of you, the one in that rather funereal suit that everyone has seen. It is quite famous, I think. Did you know that? I disagree with what others have said. I do not think you look sickly or severe or morose. Just far. Not like distant or distracted, but as though where you really were was entirely unreachable. Not because you wanted it to be like that, but that that place, that unmappable distance, was simply where you found yourself one day and never managed to make it back to near and now. When someone wants to make a claim for how far they would travel to do something, they often speak of crossing oceans or deserts. They are not truly lonely people, because they imagine that an ease to their ache and longing is at the end of the journey. Lonely people need not trouble themselves with more than the distance between two chairs at a breakfast table.
I have gone on forever and am doubtless no closer (speaking of distances) to explaining myself than if I’d not even tried.
In case I lose the courage to write again, thanks for letting me write these. Perhaps, as has been suggested, I should get a journal, but I don’t think so. If it seems odd to write to a complete stranger who, for very practical reasons, will not respond, how much more sensible is it to write to yourself? Besides, I find something a bit arrogant and self-indulgent in it. Like I was important enough to spend such time on.

Best regards,
J____ L_____

[Friends]

An excerpt from The Undiscovered Country: Essays, by Andre Bagoo
Forthcoming in September 2020 from Peepal Tree Press

Not the tennis game but, rather, the internationally acclaimed street food from Trinidad. A thing of contradiction. Deep-fried and hearty, yet totally vegan. Soft, delicate, yet hardy and meaty. Neatly wrapped for eaters on the go, yet messy, drenched in finger-licking deliciousness. One word, yet both singular and plural like barracks, binoculars, shorts. Seemingly everywhere, yet available only at certain times and certain places. Mornings and nights. Never in restaurants, always at roadsides, under tents, or off mobile carts — Trinidad’s version of the trendy food truck.

Some people say the main ingredient is chickpeas or channa. It’s an ingredient that harks to a history predating the dish itself. Chickpeas were found in places of power and reverence, buried with Egyptian mummies from 6000 BC. The Greeks, according to Plato, ate them with figs for dessert, and the Romans made dishes from them as offerings to the goddess of love. Pliny the Elder reportedly called the chickpea “the pea of Venus” and a physician to emperor Marcus Aurelius believed that chickpeas increased sperm count. The sexiness of the pea may have something to do with the fact that it looks like a butt, something which could explain its popularity among Trinidadians, though few biting into a doubles are aware that its main ingredient helped change the world. The chickpea was an affordable source of protein in ancient Rome; its cultivation supplemented the diet of subsistence farmers. In this way, the pea, the size of a very small coin, helped sustain the Roman Empire.

There are people who say the main ingredient of doubles is the bara, the bread, the deep-fried bake, the fried flatbread, between which the channa is sandwiched. In the Bible, the Hebrew word bara (meaning to shape, fashion, create) appears seventeen times in Isaiah, eight times in Genesis and six times in the Psalms. When used with God as the active subject, it means to make heaven and earth, to birth man, to engender something new, to bring about a miracle. Many hungry bellies will agree about doubles miraculous qualities in the morning. But bara has other meanings — to cut down or cut out. It also means to make yourself fat, which again is appropriate.

Yet other people say the main ingredient of doubles is not an ingredient, but the sauces. If the humble chickpea propped up empires, empires conspired, through the march of history, to give us the toppings for our doubles. The mango, that relative of the cashew, came, like the curry used in the channa, from India. It lends a sweetness to complement the savoury. Indigenous peoples of the Americas bestowed the shadon beni, a more intense cousin to cilantro, with serrated leaves and blue flowers. The tamarind, from Africa, was brought to the Americas, along with slaves, by the Spanish who, like us, enjoyed its bittersweet tartness. And then there’s pepper, an ingredient for which the nuances are so complex to the average Trinidadian it would take an entire book to discuss. But with regard to doubles and pepper, one thing is clear. When requesting “slight” pepper from a vendor, the novice should be aware there will be no real difference between “slight” and the full dose of fire. To be thorough, we must also mention the humble cucumber, also from India and also ancient. It appears in the legends of Gilgamesh and in Numbers in the Bible, before ending up as a savoury topping at Ariapita Avenue.

The consumption of doubles is a barometer of society. When the economy is healthy, robust vendors spring up like mushrooms after rain, congregating at night in hives near popular watering holes, capitalising on the flow of inebriated citizens looking for something to hit the spot after a night of excess. When the economy is going even better, “gourmet” doubles appear — stuffed with unorthodox ingredients like cheese, chicken and beef — things no proper doubles connoisseur would ordinarily want or need. But such are the ways of decadence. Economists, whenever tax revenue has fallen, call on governments to tax profligate doubles vendors.

The darker side of society, too, manifests itself around this meal. In 2012, a man was planassed with a cutlass while buying doubles. Crime, citizens said, was becoming intolerable. In 2014, three people tried to rob a doubles vendor after buying a meal. Crime, citizens said, was at an all- time high. In 2019, a doubles vendor was murdered at his doubles stand. Citizens said nothing.

I’ve heard stories about people stowing doubles in their carry-on luggage on long flights to gift hungry fans of the dish abroad. I’ve read accounts of people experimenting with the idea of freezing and shipping the bara and channa separately for reassembly elsewhere. I’ve yet to come across, however, anyone who makes doubles in their home. The recipe, involving a long process of allowing dough to rise, soaking dried beans overnight, then boiling them for a long time, then frying the bara over high temperatures, is too much even for domestic gods and goddesses. Which resonates with doubles’ central contradiction: it is casually available on the streets yet in many ways is inaccessible. Its simplicity belies its reliance on the economies of scale and collective appetite. Its flavours and textures curdle into its own realm of enjoyment — a realm with a history and complexity as multitudinous as Trinidad itself.

Yet, Trinidadians treat doubles the way they treat their own. On an ordinary day, the fact of doubles selling at the side of the road is taken for granted. But when a foreign travel writer, famous internationally, films a documentary and reports on doubles as a unique “street food” and a “speciality”, the doubles is suddenly back in vogue, restored to its status of being part of our national heritage. That heritage is at once rich as it is contingent, layered as it is unstable, unique as it is universal, succulent as it is frail, innovative as it is stale.

Courtesy Peepal Tree Press

[Friends]

Followed by this one – also by Funso.

DEAD RECKONING

They say birds always find their way back home
but home is a nowhere — a memory; a never was.

Do wings remember spaces in the air
the way we might a place? A field of rice?

How do you fly back to that? Away from
………………….a tomb of fears, this place yearning for you…

Some years ago, I lay bright flowers on
my grandmother’s grave. Years before, I saw

my grandfather’s ashes taken by the
furrowing wind in the Bocas islands.

I am not myself nor have I ever been
something apprehending the sun

and other bright celestial objects
thinking: this is a tapestry in orbit

around me. I am completely convinced that
we were the last creatures to discover

how to be in the world. My beard grows wild.
My children brush past me in the darkness.

Their chattering voices fill my ears and
then my chest and I cannot hold it in.

I am always coming home.

[Friends]

By Vahni Capildeo
From the work in progress Savannah Sequence

This week, the wheel of white-violet days
has been dropping. Velocity burns. Wheel, turn.
The doves have not landed on the roof, no,
their clever feet have not splayed or clung
along the ridges; the red tiles, unpractised
at being scaled, retain heat, while undisturbed.
The doves continue wheeling — I have seen them —
rising like a dust of sublime objection
by the very wealthy or the very young,
able to get up and leave the chamber.
Where will they land, and when? The church has lost
the blue statue from its louvred window,
the shops cleared out their garden furniture,
and toys are sent for by air. Send me then
someplace tiredness must fill my feet, high up,
maybe the abandoned tracking station.
I am no satellite. There is no moon.

[Friends]

A poem by Thaís Espaillat
From the anthology The Sea Needs No Ornament/El Mar No Necesita Ornamento, edited and translated by Loretta Collins Klobah and Maria Grau Perejoan

Published June 2020 from Peepal Tree Press

INVADING US WOULD BE A WASTE OF TIME

I don’t think that extraterrestrials
resemble my neighbours
or yours,
that they have a giant head,
purple skin,
eyes on the napes of their necks.

I’m sure they look more
like invisible jellyfish,
dust motes that float in the light,
oil stains.

And they don’t talk to us because we’re boring.

We continue
walking,
running,
flying in circles
and parallelograms.
And they exist in the grooves of watches,
the veins of planets that escape from
telescopes.

Or maybe they know so much that they don’t even talk anymore,
and only die slowly and without feeling it
or feeling it so much,
in beds travelling between our satellites
and they show up in some photos
sticking out their thousand tongues at us,
with slobber that awakens a distant volcano.

I’m sure that extraterrestrials don’t write poetry,
nor do they make movies,
they don’t cook on television,
but I’m pretty sure they have internet
and they use Tor to spy on us.
That’s when they realize
that we’re not worth it,
and they leave us with our drugs
and our porn,
and they move away on their tentacles
or their things that don’t have a name yet,
trembling from how stupid
we have always been,
while they shut off the power strip,
and from this side everything becomes
the colour of a morgue,
a mass grave,
a boot sole.

Children look at the sky,
and they realize
that there are no more wishes.
Astronauts take off their helmets in
protest;
they didn’t arrive at NASA eating through
the ozone layer
to be miners.

The common people in supermarkets and
offices rolling around and typing
with chickpea cans and plastic plants
as their final landscape,
they cry on top of each other,
they ask for help,
help-please-broken-wine-bottle-boss-
I-resign-mom-I-hate-you

And the extraterrestrials getting farther and farther away
and bigger
and smaller
and more alien in their forms,
their wings of fire,
their nitrogen teeth,
their parts that I don’t know how to assemble,
drowning
or breathing
or making their way
between the trash
and the frost,
smiling at the millions of hoggish babies
that dead stars have given birth to.

Translation of the poem “Invadirnos sería perder el tiempo” by Thaís Espaillat
Translated by Loretta Collins Klobah and Maria Grau Perejoan

[Friends]

Fiction by Barbara Jenkins
From the anthology Thicker Than Water: New Writing from the Caribbean
Published in 2018 by Peekash Press

Indira sizes up the bald little man standing at the doorway of De Rightest Place. Kitted out in a gold turtleneck long-sleeved jumper and black shorts with gold side stripes, his sparkly teeth flashing in a wide smile, he hops from one gold football boot to the other, the gold whistle suspended by a black ribbon around his neck swinging from side to side in synchronicity with his skipping dance. His gilt bonhomie could not be more at odds with Indira’s mood. The post lady, her first caller this morning, set it at black and blue when she handed over that stash of envelopes.

The visitor introduces himself by showing her a red card.

The Reverend Pastor U.R. Sukker
God Ordains Alternative Lifestyles.
http://www.ministryofGOAL.com

She flicks the card with her fingers.

You’re this person? The pastor?

He takes the gold whistle to his lips and emits a shrill blast.

Goal!

You sure you in the right place? This is a pub.

Another ear-splitting blast, and again, Goal!

As the whistle falls from his lips, Indira reaches out and grasps it firmly.

What can I do for you?

Perchance I could have the honour of conference with the lady identified on the façade of this property as the proprietress and licensee, one Indira Gabriel?

She releases the whistle.

That’s me.

Charmed, I’m sure. If it behoves you to bestow the pleasure of your company on your humble servant?

I already have a religion and I don’t want to change it.

Ha-ha. No-no. Your conclusions are not appropriate to the situation here present. No-no-no. Not at all. Ha-ha. May I have the temerity to offer a little business proposition that will bestow mutual satisfaction and benefit to the two parties here present, that is to say — me, party of the first part and thee, party of the second part?

On two conditions. First. Do not blow that whistle again. Second. Hi-falutin’ English is not my first language. So, speak simply. Understand?

He looks a little crestfallen, but he nods. Indira continues.

Drink? We have a large stock of non-alcoholic beverages.

And alcoholic ones?

What would you like?

Sitting opposite him, Indira allows him to sip his foaming Carib in silence for just a scant minute. She pushes aside her own untouched Cuba libre and drums a quick staccato on the table.

What’s up?

It is my urgent and overwhelming desire to locate my esteemed edifice of worship on your salubrious hereditament.

Indira raises her arm yellow-card style.

Ahem. I want to set up my church here.

Indira chides herself for her slip-up. How naïve of her not to interpret the blatant clues. A madman! She’d bet her bottom dollar he’s an escapee from the asylum. Glancing around under her lashes, she checks her exit route. The table would bar his way as she makes a dash for the door. She’ll throw a metal chair at him when he lunges for her. In the meantime, she will go along with him. Who knows what he might do if she lets on she’s suspicious.

Uh-huh. Here. Okay. Okay. Here. When?

Saturday.

Def-in-it-ely cuckoo. Every weekend this place is crammed with sinners who have no desire for repentance. And I, Indira, have no interest in them repenting either. There’s the lucrative wages of sin to consider. But what to do? Safer to keep on humouring him, until.

Here is very busy on weekends, you know, she says gently, as if explaining to a foreigner with limited knowledge of the culture.

Not inside. No-no. Not here. Ha-ha-ha. It’s your backyard I’m interested in. I already took a walk around. It’s De Rightest Place for a tent. Ha-ha-ha.

And?

The Ministry of God Ordains Alternative Lifestyles is planning a nine-night crusade. My branch preaches Sport as a Way to Salvation.

Your branch?

Yes. Mine. The Salvation Tree has many branches. Its roots can be traced to the original Tree of Knowledge.

Indira nods absently, her eyes darting from the pastor to the door, door to pastor, and back again. He’s on a roll, oblivious to her distractedness.

Other branches preach different things. For example, there’s Chutney Dancing as a Way to Salvation, Highway Construction as a Way to Salvation, Trawling, Quarrying, even Street-vending. Gay and Trans Life too. We cater for the full spectrum of Trinbagonian social, cultural, economic, and political activity. We’re an all-inclusive church.

Not many of those around. So?

You’ve been selected. What say you?

We haven’t talked transfer fee.

He shoots her an admiring glance. Her stare freezes his hand as it reaches for the whistle. He flashes his toothy smile and offers her a fee so attractive that she is tempted to grab his whistle and blow it herself. Exercising restraint, she simply returns his smile. Fifty percent up front; the remainder at the end. She’s already calculating how the money will be spent. Which holes plugged, to which channels some diverted. They talk some more about dates and times. As she sees him out, she tells him that she’ll finalise the following day. She must make the necessary arrangements with her teammates.

A pastor as an answer to a prayer? Indira is too well honed by hard life to believe it’s more than coincidence. But, his stepping into De Rightest Place with his proposition on the very same morning as the credit card statement and the warning letter from Winning Streak Gaming Club’s lawyer is a gift horse whose teeth she isn’t going to examine. This could be her best chance to pay off that debt, pay bills, and get back on track.

When the pub closes for siesta, Indira calls a meeting with Bostic and Fritzie.

Two matters have come up that we must talk about. First of all, the post brought a couple hefty bills. Water and Electricity. Both threatening disconnection. Secondly, we have an offer from a pastor to rent the yard for a crusade starting Saturday.

Wait-wait-wait, says Fritzie. Is Saturday you saying?

Yes. From Saturday every night for nine nights, five to nine pm.

Bostic intervenes.

So what about the regular trade?

Everything will go on as usual.

He leans back in his chair and waves a dismissive hand towards Indira.

Chuts. You can’t be serious. Bar and church can’t mix.

C’mon, Bostic. Go brave for a change.

Bostic sits bolt upright.

Brave or reckless? Think about it. Is okay with the neighbours that you turn your downstairs into a bar because here is like they home from home. But tent church? That does draw big, big crowd. It bound to have people coming in from outside. Strangers. You ever check and see how much cars does be park up here any day and night of the week? If it had, say, twenty, or even only ten more cars park up for four, five hours, there could be trouble.

It’s only for nine nights. People will adjust.

We hardly get over the disaster of the all-inclusive Carnival fete and you want to take on a next scheme?

You can hardly blame me for that. How could I have predicted that Councillor Ramluck would roll up with his drunken partners and pick a fight with Councillor Morris and his drunken crew?

Is not you self who give them councillors complimentary tickets? Giving complimentary to big shot is like open season. Them so don’t go nowhere without a whole posse of hangers-on to laugh at they lame jokes and big them up.

That wouldn’t have been a bad thing if they’d only conducted themselves in a more responsible manner.

Indira, when last you hear bout never-see-come-see politician behaving responsible, eh? What it was that former Prime Minister did say one time? “Politics have its own morality.”

I can’t see what that has to do with the matter in hand.

Plenty, Indira, plenty. Is different strokes for different folks. You don’t see how when fight break out small fry does pick up empty bottle to pelt, but big sawatee only pelting full bottle of booze? I never see so much a Grey Goose, Johnny Blue, Jack Daniels flying through the air. Jeezanages! Must be about twenty cases before the police reach. Police self was staggering around, drunk from just breathing in the fumes. You remember that, Fritzie? And, after they done mashup the place, them sons-a-bitches councillors wouldn’t pay Indira for the bottles of alcohol they waste when she send the bill. You remember how they say the ticket say unlimited premium bar? Eh?

Fritzie will not be drawn. She goes back to the first issue.

What about the utility bills? The crusade money can cover that, Indira?

For the second time that day, Indira smiles. Yes. It can. Plus we will make a big pot of corn soup to sell after the service. Churchgoers will be hungry after the exertion of testifying.

Who making soup?

You and me, Fritzie. Just like we do for the lunch trade. It’s only to make a second batch.

On her way home Fritzie is pondering. What’s the matter with Indira these days? Falling for any and every bogus scheme anybody throw at her. Between that and the new craze for casino, casino, every chance she could get away from the bar, she acting well strange. What happening with her? And is all a we to ketch. More work, work, work. Like we don’t have a life.

The first of the nine nights goes down well. A good size church crowd, sales brisk in bar and corn soup. Except for two things. One, Bostic and Fritzie are worn ragged. And two, the noise of the sound system blasting the sermon, the testifying, the hymns, setting the neighbours’ nerves on edge.

Second night, Sunday, just as good for bar and soup, just as tiring for the team. And so it goes on till Thursday evening.

It so happens that Cynthia is hosting a family christening party on Thursday, at her home, just down the road from De Rightest Place. Car with macomere come, nowhere to park, car with compere come, nowhere to park, car with baby, baby’s mother, baby’s father, baby’s mother’s mother and father come and nowhere to park. The street full up both sides with congregation cars. Traffic squeezing past in both directions. Cars circling block after block until they find a space here and there way out by the Savannah, and people have to walk blocks to reach a little “ice cream and cake” party, a little “drink a rum on the baby’s head” party. And, the final nail in the coffin, when Cynthia’s guests put on music to really party, a little raise yuh han’, wine down low, it’s getting drowned out by washed in the blood of the lamb coming from the tent church in Indira’s yard.

By four o’clock on Friday, the swelling number of converts to GOAL Ministries take up all the street parking. Residents have to abandon their precious vehicles that they’re still paying for, far, far away, at the mercy of opportunistic car thieves, and they have to hoof it home. Bostic and Fritzie are already frazzled by the relentless demand from the pious for soup and refreshment.

Friday turns to Saturday, the eighth night of the crusade. Residents launch a car parking offensive. Off work for the weekend, they occupy the streets with their cars from early. They call family and friends to park in the remaining spaces. Late afternoon rolls by. A churchgoer pulls up, her car partly blocking the entrance to a driveway. Leaving the engine running to keep the air-conditioning on, she lifts out her one-year-old, runs into the tent with him for his granny to look after, so she could go back to her car, drive until she finds a real space, park up, and then walk back with the six-year-old who is sleeping in the car. When she hustles back to where she left the car, it and her little girl are gone.

She dials the emergency number to report her missing car with child inside. Five long minutes pass as she listens to a recorded voice giving options, presses numbers, receives more recorded instructions and finally hears, all our agents are busy now. Please stay on the line. Your call is important to us. She runs back to the tent church. It is now packed full and late arrivals are standing about in little groups in the yard. She approaches one cluster and tells them what has happened. Someone offers to drive her to the nearest police station and its presiding sergeant.

Where you say your vehicle was park? Madam, you come to the wrong station. That vehicle was park outside this jurisdiction. You have to make your report at the station on the Circular Road.

At the Circular Road Station, bench loads of people are waiting to report accidents, break-ins, shootings and other everyday difficulties of life to a lone officer, hunched over pages of tortured longhand. One hour pass before it’s her turn and the officer says that the missing car can be reported there. The missing child has to be reported elsewhere, in the jurisdiction of the child’s residence.

In the meantime, rippling from one group of churchgoers outside the tent to the next, a wave of whispering flows inside, surging through the congregation as a murmuring mumbling, a lowering and nodding of heads, a shuffling of feet, a standing up, walking about, dashing around as the word spreads. They teef a lady car. A little girl get kidnap. The flock streams out, making enquiries on the street. They discover that a resident phoned Traffic Branch to haul away offending vehicles, that cars were towed, that it’s a possibility that the child and car are lodged in one of the five or so car pounds in the city. Teams of churchgoers fan out in search, and the vehicle is located in the yard of the Police Ghetto Observation Post at the eastern edge of the city.

The finders have to wait for the mother to come. When she gets there the police do not let her take her child or her car. They send her home to fetch the child’s birth certificate and the certificate of ownership for the car, to prove that both belong to her. They check her driver’s permit and the car insurance certificate. She pays the five hundred dollar fine for illegal parking and as she turns to leave with her little girl, the policeman tells her, this time I letting you off with a warning. Allyuh woman too damn careless. You lucky I not laying a charge on you for child neglect.

Back at the GOAL tent church, the Reverend Pastor Sukker’s shrill whistle summons the residue of the congregation not involved in the car search to come inside, come forward, up, up, to the front, to stay on the pitch, stay in the game. It will not be always like this, he says. No where to park. No where to sit. This is just the start. Your own clubhouse awaits you. Imagine such a place, he says. You will not need that fan you are waving, sister; no need to mop your brow, brother; the clubhouse, your clubhouse, will be fully air-conditioned. Our sister who had her car wrecked will drive into our secure car park. And you, brothers and sisters, who came in from the sidelines to sit on these plastic chairs, picture your new stands — row upon row of comfortable seating, padded, backrest, armrest, a veritable throne for each and every one. Fellow teammates at the back. Are you straining your eyes to see? Stretching your ears to hear? No more. No more. You will lift up thine eyes to wide screen plasma TVs hung all along the walls. Can we do it? Yes we can! Yes we can! But only if we all have the will to win. Only if we pull together, work as a team, keep our eyes on the ball. Send your contribution flying into the GOAL net.

Sunday dawns bright and hopeful. The priest at the more established religious institution, the one whose congregation is made up of the residents of this settled community, preaches his interpretation of the Sermon on the Mount. The reminder from the pulpit of loaves and fishes, generosity, sharing, brotherly love, do-unto-others, that sort of thing, strikes a guilty chord in the hearts of the neighbours. They file out of the church in near silence. Nobody talks about the incident of the evening before, but all who have off-street parking drive their vehicles into their carports.

It’s the last night of the nine nights crusade at the GOAL Ministries. It’s four on that dozy Sunday afternoon. Pastor U.R. Sukker is standing on the pavement glancing up and down the street. The street is as empty as the national treasury after a five-year unrestricted raid by a ruling party. A mere sprinkling of neighbours’ cars; no neighbours’ family and friends’ cars; no congregation cars either. He pulls up a gold sleeve and checks his watch over and over again, as if it’s an itch that needs constant scratching. At five, he goes into the tent and stands at the pulpit. He looks around. From overflowing on Saturday at the start of service to now, the tent is almost drained of congregation. He is not so misguided as to count as lasting converts Cecil, Boyee, Feroze, and Anil, who’ve dropped in out of Sunday afternoon ennui. What went wrong? He ponders. It wasn’t his sermons. He brings to mind the resounding singing, the ardent testifying, the thunderous clapping with which his performance was greeted every night for the past eight nights. He knows he scored hat trick after hat trick. And now this?

Alas, what was to have been a crescendo of salvation and a torrent of tithes on the big night, the Finals of the Deliverance Cup, as it were, is reduced to a feeble affirmation from that handful of faithful who live in easy walking distance of the tent, and a mere trickle of offerings into the GOAL net. Pastor can’t meet the second payment. The goalposts shifted, he explains to Indira. Indira has to admit to herself that she’s scored an own goal this time. But all is not lost. She has her own goals to consider. Forward ever. Backward never.

Next morning, Indira, Bostic, and Fritzie meet for a post mortem. From a huge pot of corn soup on the bar counter, the stench of fermenting grain wafts to where the three are sitting. Indira throws a glance at Bostic, slouched down, eyes closed, as she clears away from the table a clutter of empty beer bottles. Okay, okay, she says. So, it didn’t quite work out as planned. Bostic briefly flickers open one eyelid, lizard-style, and shifts in his chair. Fritzie looks studiously at her nails and begins to scrape off flaking nail polish with a thumbnail. Neither looks at Indira. You know what went wrong? Indira continues. Not enough parking. This is a busy little street at the best of times. Here’s what. I’ll get the backyard paved and mark off some parking spots. We can charge people to park their cars. What do you think?

[Friends]

Check out this excerpt from the novel The Mermaid of Black Conch, by Monique Roffey
Published April 2020 by Peepal Tree Press

David Baptiste’s dreads are grey and his body wizened to twigs of hard black coral, but there are still a few people around St Constance who remember him as a young man and his part in the events of 1976, when those white men from Florida came to fish for marlin and instead pulled a mermaid out of the sea. It happened in April, after the leatherbacks had started to migrate. Some said she arrived with them. Others said they’d seen her before, those who’d fished far out. But most people agreed that she would never have been caught at all if the two of them hadn’t been carrying on some kind of flirty-flirty behaviour.

—

Black Conch waters nice first thing in the morning. David Baptiste often went out as early as possible, trying to beat the other fishermen to a good catch of king fish or red snapper. He would head to the jagged rocks one mile or so off Murder Bay, taking with him his usual accoutrements to keep him company while he put his lines out – a stick of the finest local ganja and his guitar, which he didn’t play too well, an old beat-up thing his cousin, Nicer Country, had given him. He would drop anchor near those rocks, lash the rudder, light his spliff and strum to himself while the white, neon disc of the sun appeared on the horizon, pushing itself up, rising slow slow, omnipotent into the silver-blue sky.

David was strumming his guitar and singing to himself when she first raised her barnacled, seaweed-clotted head from the flat, grey sea, its stark hues of turquoise not yet stirred. Plain so, the mermaid popped up and watched him for some time before he glanced around and caught sight of her.

“Holy Mother of Holy God on earth,” he exclaimed. She ducked back under the sea. Quick quick, he put down his guitar and peered hard. It wasn’t full daylight yet. He rubbed his eyes, as if to make them see better.

“Ayyy,” he called across the water. “Dou dou. Come. Mami wata! Come. Come, nuh.”

He put one hand on his heart because it was leaping around inside his chest. His stomach trembled with desire and fear and wonder because he knew what he’d seen. A woman. Right there, in the water. A red-skinned woman, not black, not African. Not yellow, not a Chinee woman, or a woman with golden hair from Amsterdam. Not a blue woman, either, blue like a damn fish. Red. She was a red woman, like an Amerindian. Or anyway, her top half was red. He had seen her shoulders, her head, her breasts, and her long black hair like ropes, all sea mossy and jook up with anemone and conch shell. A merwoman. He stared at the spot of her appearance for some time. He took a good look at his spliff; was it something real strong he smoke that morning? He shook himself and gazed hard at the sea, waiting for her to pop back up.

“Come back,” he shouted into the deep greyness. The mermaid had held her head up high above the waves, and he’d seen a certain expression on her face, like she’d been studying him.

He waited.

But nothing happened. Not that day. He sat down in his pirogue and, for some reason, tears fell for his mother, just like that. For Lavinia Baptiste, his good mother, the bread baker of the village, dead not two years. Later, when he racked his brain, he thought of all those stories he’d heard since childhood, tales of half and half sea creatures, except those stories were of mermen. Black Conch legend told of mermen who lived deep in the sea and came onto land now and then to mate with river maidens – old time stories, from the colonial era. The older fishermen liked to talk in Ce-Ce’s parlour on the foreshore, sometimes late into the night, after many rums and too much marijuana. The mermen of Black Conch were just that: stories.

It was April, time of the leatherback migration south to Black Conch waters, time of dry season, of pouis trees exploding in the hills, yellow and pink, like bombs of sulphur, the time when the whoreish flamboyant begins to bloom. From that moment, when that red-skinned woman rose and disappeared as if to tease him, David ached to see her again. He felt a bittersweet melancholy, a soft caress to his spirit. Nothing to do with what he’d been smoking. That day, a part of him lit up, a part he’d no idea was there to light. He had felt a sharp stabbing sensation, right there in the flat part between his ribs, in his solar plexus.

“Come back, nuh,” he said, soft soft and gentlemanlike after his mother-tears had dried and his face was tight with the salt. Something had happened. She had risen from the waves, chosen him, a humble fisherman.

“Come, nuh, dou dou,” he pleaded, this time softer still, as if to lure her. But the water had settled back flat.

—

Next morning, David went to the exact same spot by those jagged rocks off Murder Bay and waited for several hours and saw nothing. He smoked nothing. Day after, the same thing. Four days he went out to those rocks in his pirogue. He cut the engine, threw out the anchor, and waited. He told no one what he had seen. He avoided Ce-Ce’s parlour, the property of his kind- hearted, bigmouth aunt. He avoided his cousins, his pardners in St Constance. He went home to his small house on the hill, the house he’d built himself, surrounded by banana trees, where he lived with Harvey, his pot hound. He felt on edge. He went to bed early so as to rise early. He needed to see the mermaid again, to be sure that his eyes had seen correctly. He needed to cool what had become an inflammation in his heart, to pacify the buzz that had started up in his nervous system. He had never had this type of feeling, certainly not for no mortal woman.

Then, day five, around six o’clock, he was strumming his guitar, humming a hymn, when the mermaid showed herself again.

This time she splashed the water with one hand and made a sound like a bird squeak. When he looked up he didn’t frighten so bad, even though his belly clenched tight and every fibre in his body froze. He stayed still and watched her good. She was floating port side of his boat, cool cool, like a regular woman on a raft, except there was no raft. The mermaid, with long black hair and big, shining eyes, was taking a long suspicious look at him. She cocked her head, and it was only then David realised she was watching his guitar. Slow slow, so as not to make her disappear again, he picked it up and began to strum and hum a tune, quietly. She stayed there, floating, watching him, stroking the water, slowly, with her arms and her massive tail.

The music brought her to him, not the engine sound, though she knew that too. It was the magic that music makes, the song that lives within every creature on earth, including mermaids. She hadn’t heard music for a long time, maybe a thousand years, and she was irresistibly drawn up to the surface, real slow and real interested.

That morning David played her soft hymns he’d learnt as a boy, praising God. He sang holy songs for her, songs which brought tears to his eyes, and there they stayed, on this second meeting, a small patch of sea apart, watching each other – a young, wet-eyed Black Conch fisherman with an old guitar, and a mermaid who’d arrived on the currents from Cuban waters, where once they talked of her by the name of Aycayia.

*

I disappear one night, in a big storm
long long ago
Island once where Taino people live
and the people before Taino
North in this pattern of islands and west too
The island I remember
was shaped like a lizard
I have seen the sea
I have seen its glory
I have seen its power
the power of its kingdom
I have swum its angers
I have swum its misery
I have swum its velvet floor
the corals
the cities underneath
I have swum under islands
I have swum close to shore in shallow waves
and seen children playing
I have swum with slow steel canoa
I have swum everywhere in this archipelago
I have swum with large POD of dolphins
I have swum with SHOAL of fish
big like the size of one whole human being
I have dived into walls of ocean
I would have died very soon as a woman
Forty cycles? Children, husband
life of land and life of birth and death
Instead I lived for more than a thousand cycles
inside the sea
I was not alone at the time of my cursing
an old woman was also cursed
and she disappeared too same night
long long ago so long I don’t know the time
only that they called up a huracan
to take me far away
seal up my legs inside a tail

*

David Baptiste’s Journal, March 2015

Whenever I see the first leatherbacks arrive, I always feel happy. I know she, my mermaid, will soon appear, happy too, to greet me. I used to look out for she every evening from April onwards. She always knew where to find me, by the same jagged rocks where we first ketch sight of each other, one mile off Murder Bay. Still a private place, even now, since all the damn fish in the sea get fished out. I look out for Aycayia more than half mih damn life. I have plenty women since those days long past, all kinda woman – friend, babymother, lover – but nothing ever again like she.

She was something else.

I am an ol’ man now, and sick sick so I cyan move much, sick so I cyan work, go out to sea, and so I go write my story. I go sit down and drink a rum or two to drown my sorrow, drown my damn fuckin heart in this bottle. After Hurricane Rosamund, everything changed, man, every last damn thing blow away and then, one year on from the time we meet, yeah, she come back!

Miss Rain teach she words in that time she came by me, after they pull she out of the sea that fateful day. She know language of her own, and some of these words came out in our sexing. But it was a long-ago language and her memory of it wasn’t strong. She hadn’t spoken it for so very long. While we lived together, we learn the name of every fish, she and me, from the same encyclopedia that belong to Miss Rain. I would take it out in my boat. Aycayia like to learn and she wanted to know the name of every fish in the whole damn ocean, everything in the sea and along the shore. I learn half those names myself – and every fish have a Latin name too. So all now she is a mermaid who know the names of every damn fish in the sea in two languages, an’ some she can call in she own tongue.

The mermaid scare me like hell when I first see her. Her top half pop up from the sea. She was red, like an Amerindian woman, and all scaly and glittery too, like she polish sheself up good. Up she came from nowhere, man. I heard a splash and then woosh.

Up she rise. She appreciate them hymns I was singing that day. Turned out she like the sound of my voice, how it carry over the water. Later I came to understand she arrived at our shores from Cuban waters. Only much later did she tell me her strange story and her name. She travel down from there on the currents with an old woman, Guanayoa. I remember how she was curious about the encyclopedia. What name I have, she ask. How come I don’t have a picture in there?

Over the next few weeks, I saw her maybe every day. She got to know the sound of the motor on my boat. Like she was waiting. I was careful about pissing in the water. I brought an old jerry can for that. I decided to be patient and so I sat and wait for she, long hours. Next thing, I see one big tail fin, big like a pilot whale. My heart felt warm. She opened my heart, one time, that mermaid, Lawd. She made my heart swell up in my chest, just like that. She open my mind, too, to other animals and fish we don’t know about. She use to swim the sea sad sad, or so she say, before we met. I ent know how she survive all those years in that big ocean, all alone. She had to be brave for that, though she was fraid of me, when we met, of what I might do if I ketch her good. She and I lock eyes many times, in wonder at each other, before them Americans catch her.

One time, when we first meet, she swam close to my boat. I saw her real good then. Her head was smooth smooth, delicate, small eyes, small face. She looking like a woman from long ago, like old- time Taino people I saw in a history book at school. She face was young and not pretty at all, and I recognise something ancient there too. I saw the face of a human woman who once lived centuries past, shining at me. I saw she breasts, under the fine scaly suit. I saw webbed fingers and how they dripped with sargassum seaweed. Her hair was full of seaweed too, black black and long and alive with stinging creatures – like she carry a crown on her head of electricity wires. Every time she raise up her head I watch her hair fly up, like she ketch fire-coral inside it.

Then, there was her tail. Oh Laa-aad-o. The things a man could see, especially if he connect with nature, and live close to the sea.

I saw that part of this creature from my boat. Yards and yards of musty silver. It gave she a look of power, like she grow out of the tail itself. I think, then, that this fish-woman must be heavy as a mule. She must weigh four or five hundred pounds, easy. When I see her first, I reckon she come from some half-space in God’s great order, like she was from a time when all creatures were getting designed. She was from when fish was leaving the sea behind, growing legs, turning into reptiles. She was a creature that never make it to land. Is what I was thinking before I hear she own story. I figure she and she kind get interrupted somewhere in the middle of God’s act of creation.

I was a young fella back then. I never stop to think I could make trouble for she. Man already make her miserable, women curse her good: that’s how she end up a mermaid in the sea, condemn to loneliness and her sex seal up inside a big tail. That was what them women had in mind, to keep her away from their men. After I rescue her, I never imagine she could get hurt again, by man or by me. Many times I sing and play my guitar to her off them rocks in Murder Bay. I never bother dropping my lines after seeing her the second time, ’cause I fraid of hooking her. Was my fault, though, they ketch her, them Yankee men. My fault. She thought she heard the engine sound of my pirogue, Simplicity. I was there with them, and so she follow their boat by accident.

[Friends]

This poem is also one of my favourites (by the same author):

KISS AND QUARREL IN WHISPERS

1.
When your house borders a thoroughfare
and your innate and consummate desire
is to escape the arrows of future songs
and the cobra fangs in their chorus lines
you learn to kiss and quarrel in whispers,
conscious of neighbours and passers-by
with feline footfalls and amebo mouths –
their rumour-metres factory-set
to the speed of chameleon tongues
out to feast on swarms of rainflies,
roused by the first rain of the year
ordained to end the reign of an obdurate dry season.

2.
If you allow cracks on your firewalls,
all manners of uninvited crawlers
will wake from their slothful slumbers
under damp and mossy rocks
with hands and mouths unwashed
to demand pride of place
at the head-table of your by-invitation-only banquet.

3.
For your own protection
erect perimeter walls with no conscience
around your sanctuaries
to keep out the green eyes
and foul mouths of rubberneckers,

but remember to keep those walls
low enough for you to pass your offerings
of unblemished fruits, scented oils, and colour-coded flowers
to wake up those ancestors napping in heaven
to their duty of care to those of us still here in the struggle on earth.

Remember too to build secret exits into your houses
in the unlikely event that Sango’s vengeful thunderbolts,
confused by the sameness of modern city streets
and an inability to read directions on Google Maps,
should mistake your shuttered homes for your enemies’ bunkers.

[Friends]

Here are some guidelines and infomation about Rules and deadlines for the Bristol Prize too, if anybody is looking to enter!

https://www.bristolprize.co.uk/rules