At Home in the Modelo Market
       

An old man pulls the wrinkles of his dark face back.
rm badder than you,
he tells me, handing me my change
for the rooster. My black & white
speckled rooster: My amulet,
like a necklace of herbs, I never told my mother about.

This market of rooms like those in a hive
or in one's head. Black bodies mark these walls,
& walk away into an amber countryside.
Then, a dark sun.
My father's black face he hated—the cobalt suit
he always wore, hanging here, in one of these rooms.

There is a woman and her baby;
a knee bobbing.
Buy a potion for luck, an elixir for love, she asks.
My father had a baby, a boy
whose name I learned in a letter
tucked in a book on Papa's shelf

A faceless doll releases a bird—
one thousand pin pricks on the ear.
My mother was a saint who never said a word.
There are women plaiting hair
who only hear the way
hair sizzles & burns to seal the braids. Above,

wind chimes with full skirts & tiny brass legs
never stop ringing.
There was a time I believed
my family was dead
because I slipped that letter right back in its hiding place.
The saints in Mamajuana bottles.

It gives the rum a good kick.
An amber countryside
stretches across my eyes.
Then a baby falls to the ground. A Mosaic
of broken beaks & limbs at my feet & footsteps
never stop invading. Everyone needs a rooster.
They know how to keep the hens in line.

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Copyright © 2018 Ines P. Rivera Prosdocimi All rights reserved
from Love Letter to an Afterlife
Black Lawrence Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission