Life, Unscripted, on the Rock

Brown eyes drew me into you, long moments before we slipped into an easy, yet brief, embrace at that first fortuitous meeting. At the second, more planned rendezvous, fingers skimmed an elbow like swans gliding over a lake. Warm breath fanned hair aside to whisper a phrase or a question that made my lips curve upward. Our words coupled before strangers. Afterwards, in the taxi that whisked me homeward, my mind revisited your countenance when I kissed you. Softly. On the cheek.

If these walls could talk, they would have told, with unerring accuracy, the precise number of times they had heard her bones crack, upon being hurled against them, of how the two little ones had often huddled against them, swathed in shadows and terror. They would have told how she had caught the enormous, green lizard that fateful morning and boiled it in his cornmeal porridge with coconut milk and a dash of nutmeg and a spoonful of lethal hate. How she had watched him eat death.
But these are… Continue

Today, I remember another rain-shrouded afternoon,
when fat drops fell like Humpty Dumpty
from the zinc roof,
splattering and splintering
into a myriad, glassy pieces
against the unyielding concrete.
My bare feet would itch to feel its cool wetness,
even as my stomach pr… Continue