A Retrograde

She crept into my room, took me outside into the mosquito night thick with the gutted hums
of fishermen’s wives, piercing the flesh of a sleep walking sky.

She taught me that cobwebs are hammocks for spirits, a stop along the way to rest their weary 
skins, a knot on the thread of their pilgrimage to a place they had almost touched once.

In those days, a village could grow legs. Wedge itself deep into the throat of mountains
where horses couldn’t smell it, where footsteps couldn’t sear its memory onto 
peeling roads.

Dear mama:








Dear mama:

The orchids have teeth
the machetes are ornaments
rusting upon the walls.
I want to build you a temple
of teeth
but my hands are too tender
my hands are for stringing
the rice grains of rosaries.

On the ocean roams a shadow of splinters
the fish are hurling themselves onto the shore
the shore will break into birds of dust
the scales are mirrors
blinding the sun.
On the ocean roams a shadow of splinters
how will I swim to you
when the day is done?

by Desiree Bailey

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Desiree Bailey hails from Trinidad & Tobago and Queens, NY. She has received fellowships from Princeton in Africa, The Norman Mailer Center and Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop and is a recipient of the Poets & Writers 2013 Amy Award. She is currently the fiction editor at Kinfolks Quarterly and an MFA Fiction candidate at Brown University.