Fass and Outta Place
After Jennifer Rahim
This is beg pardon
For the plants that start small
But outgrow their place
For the thyme we plant next to the fence
Small clusters of tiny impositions
Growing over into the neighbor backyard
I beg pardon for such precociousness
Budding stalks smelling up the whole
Garden with it ugly woody limbs
Pushing aside Miss Mary orchids and hibiscus
Stretching out over the pimento and chive
Like we didn’t just give it a little corner
A little piece of dirt patch chook up
By the back wall where we does throw
The kitchen scraps and let the dog out
To do he business. For poor Brownie
Whose fur now permanently smell
Like season pork, I beg pardon.
This is a novena for the abandoned
The Chinese doctor outside child
Who come out more black than charitable
Who mother run away to America
And leave the pickney to bounce from
Front step to back trace to hole in the wall
Who had the gall to come first in test
In front all the cousins who slept in beds
And wore good shoes—for this I beg pardon.
This is a ring of protection for the just come
The Guyanese immigrant traveling from
Chaguanas to Westmoorings each morning
To clean house and water pink babies
While their mothers clock time at the gym
Who eat dahl and rice everyday to save
So the children she leave could go college
And get degree instead of big belly—
Break the chain and start again
I beg pardon for all who dare to dream
The bird-drop and the blanched seed
The vine that root deep and claim blooming.
Lisa Alexander Sets the Record Straight with Yemoja
My son didn’t come from a broken home
We held it together the best we could
I worked morning and evening
And all the dead hours in between
He wasn’t an invisible teen
I put him by Mammy after his father died
And she was with him all day
Till she had to go to work at night
And I called him all the time on the phone
Made sure I answered his every need
I did my best to keep him from straying
I tell him about the friends he keep
But he was 18, and always loved the water
Always keen to your whispering, Yemoja.
When he didn’t answer my calls
I should’ve come down the road
But God know, most times I-self struggling to keep my head
Above water
No, he wasn’t a neglected child
I make sure all my children had homes
Place to sleep and food to eat
My embrace stretched wide from Tunapuna to
Diego. Joshua knew he was loved.
Perhaps you listen too much to what people say
Misunderstood my distance for abandonment
Thought I didn’t appreciate the gift of his life
So you called out to him
Wrapped your arms around him and took him back
To the watery depths of your womb.
But it was MY name he called out, Yemoja
As you pressed your blue lips to his
And took his last breath.
Mother Earth Gets Shot on the Beetham
For Ornella Greaves
All we who live close to the decay—
The rancid carcass and every bloated
Excess of the white man; the black
Burning that never go out—we know
If we don't make a lil’ ramajay
Bun some tire and skin we gum
Princess Margaret and Uncle Tom go just turn
The page to the next story.
They make spectacle of our suffering
And call it riot. When we boy-children get shoot
In the road like dog, no matter what bring them to it
The mother in we does bawl out.
I went to make sure I was witness
I went to show them that a poor woman
Like me can stand eye to eye with those
Who perpetrate to jam they boot in we neck
But as I pull out the phone to record
My natural eye weaken—it tap my Spirit
And the bullet find me like a magnet
But as I fall down, the child in my belly
Make me to see. It was the police who shoot me.
Simone Leid is a poet from Trinidad and Tobago. She has had poems published in Callaloo and Tongues of the Ocean and in Writing for Our Lives: A Caribbean Climate Justice Anthology (Peekash Press, 2025). She is a fellow of the Cropper Foundation Residential Workshop for Caribbean Writers, the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop, and the Moko Writers’ Workshop. She holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine, and is working on completing her first manuscript, tentatively titled “Mother Tongue.”