Embedded Files
The Sea is the Fiercest Mother
Mayaro
A child stoops down on Easter Sunday,
swirls his bowl at the water’s edge.
Sand awakens, minnows dart
between toes.
Mangroves open dark alveoli
into the wide lung of the ocean,
coast exhales, one long brackish breath
and the child is swept to sea.
Ortoire / Nariva
My mother will not leave
the parked car, not even to stand
at the sea wall’s edge. Dark water groans
against worn rock. It calls out to her,
she says. Deep water always has.
I lean out the window, face in the wind.
To me, the waves say nothing.
People ask “You live on an island.
Why you can’t swim?”
See, communion with the tide
is a difficult science. All the bodies
in the heavens will have their turn
pulling the nets
and the course never stays
the same: mad Atlantic
two blind rivers,
ground gives way again and again.
Blanchisseusse
I close my eyes as we hurtle
through the waves, Paria to Blanchisseusse
in a boat too small to hold us all.
My mother loops her fingers
through the life vests
of her two youngest children
though she herself cannot swim.
Toco
Objects lost at sea do not come right back to shore.
It turns out, dry land has a weak hold on us after all
in spite of our feet and lungs. The secret life
of sunken things must unravel like blue thread
a ribbon of current, a sonar spiral, spooling round
and round till it is finished.
A Woman Who Might Have Been
With your brokenness, you can buy
a house, fill it with plastic and splinters.
You can go to bed at night in a caul
of loneliness, in the dark, longing
to say nothing at all. You can say
less and less until your face turns
into a question, a wisp of dust
trapped in incandescent lamplight.
In the gilt-framed mirror, you refract
into a million hues, spin across
each surface like fleeting memory,
a woman who might have been,
if things had been different.
If things had been different,
you might have been a woman
who did not break at the hinges,
body a forgotten cupboard filled with maps.
Each conversation is a confessional:
I am a wasp’s nest, a wind chime
made of birds’ bones. To put myself back together
I have mapped three generations of pain
But no one wants to live in the house
of plastic and splinters. It is strange
and sharp, teeth scraping in silence.
So with your brokenness
you can tend the garden of cracked bottles
watch light fracture into prisms
into promises that cut when you hold them
into a lingering afterimage of who
you might have been
if things had been different.
Your shadow bends at the doorway
half-woman, half-absence,
a ghost rehearsing bright lines
in an empty room.
Danielle Boodoo-Fortuné is a poet and visual artist from Trinidad and Tobago. Her work has been published in Poetry London, The Rialto, The Prairie Schooner, The Asian American Literary Review, Wasafiri, and others. She was awarded the Wasafiri New Writing Prize in 2016, and shortlisted for the Montreal Poetry Prize in 2017 and 2020. Her first collection of poetry, Doe Songs (Peepal Tree Press, 2018) was awarded the OCM Prize in Caribbean Poetry.
Copyright © 2026 by Danielle Boodoo-Fortuné, all rights reserved. This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of Copyright law. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the notification of the journal and consent of the author.
Report abuse