Nothing Softer Could Form on My Tongue
When I asked my father to
teach me to swim, he pulled
me into the canoe, paddled
out to sea, threw me over
-board. No hand reached
down when I surfaced for air,
mouth full of sand and salt.
I’ve feared the sea ever since.
I called my father boss because
nothing softer could form on
my tongue. On days I visited
him, he hid behind ghosts
of smoke, insisted I call him
Dad. For years, I tried to make
fathers out of strange men,
cried for a dad until my throat
ached. I said boss and fanned
the ghosts to see his face.
The Altar of Mother Worship
When I was thirteen, I poured kerosene over my
body & lit a match. Mother said there was more
than enough land to bury me in. Later that year, I
stood on a cliff at Fort Charlotte, the whole school
gasped behind me, & below, the wide arm of the
sea urged me into its peace. In Kendal, the school’s
counsellors collected mother’s tears & forced me
to drink drop after drop until my mouth was full
of praise. They left me there, repentant, at the altar
of mother worship, my offerings of silence & shame
& regret raised above my head. Mother forgave my
sacrilege, but not before I fell to my knees, eyes wet
with wonder, hands clasped in adulation, & prayed.
Gramoxone
Children, some as young as six months old, have been burnt with hot irons,
chopped with knives or machetes, soaked with boiling water,
beaten to within inches of their lives with electrical cords.
—Jamaica Gleaner, 2017
The boy poured gramoxone into the bowl of cornmeal porridge.
Enough to kill his father; too much to stop the porridge from
turning green. It was the stirring that saved his father’s life;
green steam rose toward the ceiling the way souls leave
the dead. We couldn’t tell the boy’s screams from those of the
pigs on his father’s farm. His father beat him with tools he used
to butcher them. We took turns dressing his wounds, emptied
our vials of gramoxone, thought of better ways to kill our parents:
colorless poisons; throats slit in sleep; hard shove into a ravine.
Geographies of Joy
I.
Pell River Square, where we
played cricket barefooted on
the marl road, our soles, hard as
wheels, crushed pebbles during
sprints between wickets. Eyes
closed, mouths agape, we
swung bats carved from coconut
branches: four runs when the
ball rolled into someone’s living
room; six when it lodged in a tree.
Oldtimers cheered from the hill
overlooking the Square, their
spliff-smoke a low-moving sky.
II.
Pell River Spring, which filled our
buckets long after standpipes
stopped running & drought dried
out water drums. Some Saturdays,
on the way to Spring Valley, we
added firewood from the mango
grove to our crocus bags of pots
& condiments. In the makeshift
kitchen on the riverbank, we
cooked crayfish fresh from the
river, yam & coco from the land,
the valley simmered into a stew,
valley carried home in our bellies.
III.
Corner Shop on Bottom Road,
where we gathered to ease the
weight of our day. Each slam of
a domino on the wooden table,
a kind of relief. Victories spilled
into the roof. Stillness as we read
the new game. We went for
communion: blunt, bread, rum
passed around. We ate, drank,
smoked & felt forgiven. This
is how we learned to take losses
with grace. We prepared ourselves
to face the smallness of our lives.
Juleus Ghunta is a Chevening Scholar, a poet, and an editor. His poems have appeared in The Caribbean Writer, Wasafiri, Poetry Archive, and Chiron Review, among other journals. In 2025, he was selected by the Writers’ Guild of Alberta as one of six Writers-in-Residence tasked with supporting emerging writers across Alberta. He received the Catherine James Poetry Prize in 2017, won a Poetry Archive Wordview Prize in 2023, placed second in the 2024 Charles Causley Trust International Poetry Competition, and was honored with the 2025 Buffys Literary Arts Award by Arts Council Wood Buffalo. His work was a finalist for the Small Axe Poetry Prize (2015, 2016), the Wasafiri New Writing Prize (2022, 2024), and the Alberta Magazine Awards Essay Prize (2025). He is the author and editor of several children’s books, including You Never Know What You’re Going to Get: An Anthology of Short Stories (Chalkboard, 2025).