Poetry

Por la tarde—Choluteca

12pm
Arid and black rooster
Vulture-clustered roadside
Gizzard-face dogs finish.
Fruit stalls of black banana,
Grey orange, gold tooth,
Bags of beans, shoeless kids
Burn plastic to the sun.

1pm
The ants spew from their baking cracks
Resume a sack of bar limes
Almost steaming by the road.
Deftly part the dust and rind
From their last grip on juice.
It never rains this time of year
But may break this afternoon.

2pm
Narrow dogsballs swinging in the shade
(the ants would love to get at these)
beneath their emaciated formings of bone.
Trotting with long leather tongues
Lace-worked in wound skins
With promise latent
Of vegetal moisture.

3pm
In the kitchen I smell melon:
A nice dozen pile the floor,
An orgy of dozing tortoise
On tile.
In the afternoon heat, their shells
Split shatter their backs
Shower their juices.
Insides bloom.

4pm
Between the flowers newly browned
One notes correspondingly
The smell they impart growing
As heat rises from the dead petal,
The backbone of the mountains,
And disperses in the clouds.
Wind blows leaves through the patio.

5pm
An hour of light
Through the various cross-hatchings:
A wood-wickered rocking chair,
A man-eating hammock,
The tallest tree to the west.
Birds slowly circle the sky.
Voice-less. Name-less.

6pm
The wind is up, the power’s down
And one walks slow
To keep the candle burning
With gritty feet sliding
Round the creaking kitchen.
Underground, the water in the cistern
Is still warm.

Dominic Zugai