From What Became My Grieving Ceremony. Published by Thistledown Press in 2014.
Sucking marrow from his chicken bones, spitting the splinters on the rim of a white china plate, he cracks the knuckles of his index fingers, first one then the other, belches quietly into his fist, eyes closed on another place a different table a two-room house its rusted roof the palm in neighbour’s yard, a splinter in the meat of his heel from shimmying its ragged trunk. Leotha, his mother, digs it out with her eyebrow tweezers, blows soft on the wound, her ribs hidden in layers of mother-fat church dress, apron. Roughs the sand from his skin with her hand, cuffs hard his small ear, settle boy, settle. Shows the sliver, shaming his tears with the click of her tongue. Her children all left home young, four girls, three boys, my father. Strayed fast from Trinidad to Harlem Boston Rosthern, Saskatchewan abandoned the taste of fried doubles buljoul dasheen turmeric green iguana and how Leotha delighted in shark-and-bake on Sundays. And she, poor and afraid to fly, stayed in the red-roofed house, a whelp of aging bones a voice on a long, long-distance line. My father breaking a thigh bone in his teeth rubs his tongue down the cracked leg bone and licks it whistle-clean.
