Filibuster to Delay Speaking to My Aunt about the Death of Her Son
I begin with a prayer for the red-furred mutt you brought home on an empty Friday afternoon for the way it hated the sound of thunder how it would hide under the loveseat or the day we could no longer hear its nails on the makeshift patio and we knew it had gone to lay in bush to die away from the family so we would not have to grieve or turn its body over into a shallow grave like we did the rooster who caught bird flu at the height of the pandemic so we buried it under the trunk of the Hog Berry tree away from the house sadder still at the cock fights we would not get to enroll it in but grateful when upon missing the fight we were set to attend we heard the sirens wailing from the cockpit and learned later of the man whose rooster flew onto his face and pecked his left eye the unlucky side and my mother said that even if that had not rendered him blind the diabetes that ran in his family would have for sure coffins are sometimes congenital I suppose our next door neighbor Sister Pat once left for the hospital belly bursting with baby and came back with nothing to show for it and you said it was for all the babies she threw away that even though she became a Christian God would still seek atonement for the blessings she returned but her husband prayed to both God and the obeah man for deliverance from the barrenness so sister Pat came to church dressed in white one Sunday and laid down a Holy Spirit dance though it wasn’t until she went to visit the obeah man alone that we see a belly forming and then a baby boy come strong like hard rum it’s hard rum you need for days like this chaser for the grief
The Hermetic of Receding Tides
for Nayib
We leaned on the ocean,
salted our feet in rock pools,
cast out lines without rods,
dropped sinkers on coral reefs.
Cousin, you were the ruler
of Casey Bay monuments.
Let down your line and
sat like still water,
in the break of morning sun,
until it met a tug or
your belly craved too fully
the skipped breakfast
awaiting you at home.
I picking whelks visible
by the hermetic of receding tides
made a mimicry of your stillness.
I envied how you, a collector,
could identify by tug
what was about to be reeled in,
how you could smell
whether earthworms or crabs
would attract the fish.
On the porch,
after Casey Bay days,
I would re-enact the
lull of your body as you
reeled in your catch.
Sat at the top of the railings
and with folded legs
practiced your tight-lipped,
straight-back sitting.
I remembered,
after missing your funeral,
the young parrot fish,
the soft wax of its scales.
The way your hands,
tender and thorough,
pulled the hook from
its fluttering gills and
gave it back to the sea.
If caught again, dengue fever would kill me. It was my fault for letting mosquitoes drink from my body, offering a meal for which they did not have to die. I could never stand to see them flat against our yellow walls, the walls I clung to when the fever whispered my dead grandmother’s voice in my ear. I shivered under duvets in the Virgin Gorda heat and its zeal to make a memory out of any living thing. I laid in bed, frozen with fever for five days thinking I would exit this world having never kissed the boy from fifth form who sat with me at lunch. My mother put me under a cold shower, rubbed me down with ALCOLADO and LIMACOL; an obeah woman brewing a cure for my folly, for having seen the mosquitoes as equals. On the sixth day, I sat up stiff with the surprise of surviving. A mosquito landed on my arm, full of blood, drowsy with its capture, in need of a place to rest. When my mother saw the mosquito, she raised her hand to finish it. I caught her hand at her wrist, cupped the mosquito in my palms, carried it to the galvanize windows and dropped it. The spring that I caught dengue fever in fourth form, I learned mosquitoes are the world’s deadliest animals and, were there none, bog orchards would never bloom.
Johanna Gibson is a writer from the Virgin Islands (UK). She received a BA in English from the University of Southampton. Her work has appeared in Moko Magazine, Pree Lit, and Persimmon Review and was shortlisted for the Bocas Emerging Writers Fellowship (2022) and the Bridport Poetry Prize (2023). An alumnus of the Obsidian Foundation Retreat, she is a member of the Southbank Poetry Collective.