Amor Ankara

My bones rattle like beads in a turtle shell--

Because I’d let it go, seen death,

regarded and admitted a dark north night.

And then the drums from deep under:

Stomping grass and chicken dance because you’re on my mind, again;

Did someone give me permission to wake you from the dead, my silent exiled lover…?

The dead father of my future unborn children:

A día de los muertos love all covered in Mayan death masks

And painted over with marigolds.

The Mexican wedding cookies are delicious,

Like your cold fingers,

All chocolate-y among the sugar skulls.

Our ghost children look on in the kente dresses I make for them in my dreams,

And my son still says your name sometimes,

And I may not be with you, my witch doctor magician,

But I still make the dishes because I like their flavor

as I liked to taste you in all your earthy musky scent,

Covered in working cotton all day, even your stress sweat smelled good to me.

I’m a forest widow, living in some strange fairy tale:

Marriage of dead ghosts and spirit husbands who walk in the night,

And I hear the broken branches but never see those eyes,
And the vines hang down, a web weave fog of breath between us,

And the forest and her mmotia are quick to cover for you, taking their ghost back,

So your human love cannot reclaim you over the River Styx.

Pan plays his flute, and Cupid falls asleep,

And I lay like Venus, awake and pining for my Mars

Called away again into the ghosts and vines of his own mind,

Stealing him from me, stealing him from light,

Letting nothing grow

But vines that he must fight.