off to saint lucia

by Clifton Gachagua

Lee SH

when the beluga shows up and offers me her child first i have to learn the sign language for no and sonar for madness

and some ottoman script for sadness, anthropocene, debilitate, how the sand on the beach is now only fine glass, each one an illumination of what it means to be, and how, now that i am in the company of a whale, polishing its bones, dawn to dusk, the monsoon on our backs, sailing through the estuary and into mauritius, learning creole, collecting shells we wear as hats, communing with dead fishermen, now reincarnated as coral reef fish, faceless tigers, zebras, parrots, damsels, stone, trunk, mandarins butterflies — is this the extent of nomenclature? —  blues we can no longer put in baby cots, call offspring, and whose eternity is now the width of the bubble of an aquarium, and the angels, the guild of ferrymen, god’s children, babies who did not survive ectopia cordis and here is a government tender with a poet from saint lucia to harvest them, but only during the kaskazi and only at night, with dynamite. and we swim these shores, me and the child beluga, orchids in our ears, brogue and sequins and cottontails for dinner, carrying rosaries with missing beads for every forgotten prayer.

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Clifton Gachagua is the author of Madman at Kilifi. His work appears in Obsidian, +doc, ANMLY, Prism, Glassworks, the87press, Africa39, Manchester Review, among others.