Three Poems

Jane Alberdeston Coralin



PAPI FRYING PLANTAINS ON SATURDAY MORNING

It would be the fruit of our breakfast, platanos,
tostones, cut, fried, then smashed with the force of your hand
between the book of a folded paper sack, fried again,
grease stains growing with each Papi push.
Your art was to not let the bananas crumble,
but smear in the brown bag, perfect circles
with little veins, shimmery yellow coins to salt,
then nibble on with dots of garlic or ketchup.
Other kids had Cheerios or English muffins.
You would have none of that, pulling open the fridge door
tossing the hard Florida plantain bodies onto the table,
peeling them in your hands the way a craftsman holds,
learns his tool.

You seemed happy those weird cartoon mornings
Sullivan Heights sun pushing through sleepy plastic blinds
cracking along the strips of your fat cable knit. With your husk bent
over the gouged linoleum, breath spiced with the anjojoli
of anise, six sips waiting close by in a shot glass, I could not imagine
you wanting to run, you in your sweater and fruit of the looms, standing
there with nothing but bananas in your hands.

What fatherly duty, what work, food for your babies,
watching the blackening lard, your face focused, what breakfast,
\break fast, break, fast, break, break, run, fast, run, run, in your sweating face,
\scared animals. Or a sputtering oil burn.

I could have touched your hand
but how does a 10 year old even think of trying,
your fingers grabbing for the green plantain
a long blinking blade splitting a smile in the skin.



ODE TO DECIMA

She is encincta*, Spanish for enlaced
Embarazada, a kiln heavy with clay
For what seems an eternity, I make her belly round
like no week of cuajito*
Her man creeps out, follows San Juan’s neon 
her cravings pregoneros* in the night
She whistles. I recognize the tune, tap along her rib
Carmen Delia’s decima croons cha-cha-cha. 

When I come out, I will watch her like a new
husband, see she is beautiful with age
Her years will count themselves in gray, rest and
fold, her landscape of skin like washed burlap
Just as coquis* tick, her bones mark the time
rattle with each movement: soft, hard, left, right
butt, belly, back, side: with sleepless motion
I am a swimmer greasing the Channel
She holds me, a coiling carpet python
dreams of sons, fathers, baskets of bread, fish
Soon I will press blue Yemaja lips
split salt waters:  bacalao to asopao.

      *encinta, embarazada: pregnant
       *pregoneros: town criers who sold their wares, calling in the early morning to housewives.
       *decima: The decimas are a centuries-old poetic form widely popular in the Spanish-
          speaking Caribbean and in Latin America. Improvised couplets of ten syllables each,
          they link the Puerto Rican tradition to 16th Century Spanish poetic practice. The
          songs, sung acappella, entwine the ancient traditions of oral story telling. 
       *Decima: the Roman goddess of childbirth
       *cuajito: Puerto Rican dish made of tips of pig ears
       *coqui: fingernail-sized tree frog indigenous to Puerto Rico, named for his song in the night
       *bacalao: salted cod fish
       *asopao: rice and fish stew

LESSONS IN TRAILER LIVING

My grandmother used to catch mice.
The trailer skittered under the muse of their visitations —
we would discover them in the morning
gutted like red snapper on the linoleum
the chase still on their small faces

lesson one:

death is the machination of old women
hell-bent on keeping a clean house

lesson two:

death happens at night
a force maneuvering through the dark
in wild thumping motions

lesson three:

because   “rats carry disease, have fleas”
we hoped we’d be put out
tied to a fence post in the backyard 
like our dog Otto

A mouse was dead and
we could not outwardly grieve for him,
though he reminded us of clocks striking one
and murderous farmers’ wives
Poor little Daleville Trailer Park mouse
mistaking our home for refuge
finding a place
where bread and children are tucked away,
secret as the poison in arsenic.