for Christina
While tending the garden, Christina spots something
strange. I hate Florida but I’ll go anywhere for girlfriends
and good tacos, and thankfully, her pocket hometown doesn’t
give me greasy wedgie sandal tan vibes or buy-one-get-one
coladas that taste like lotion and wax. In her Florida, my hair reddens
and I leave piles of half-shells in my wake, forever lusting after oyster
juice, and once I saw a leatherback weaving through dark dunes, that
cretaceous queen unphased by mortal gawkers, weary from hours
of tilling sand into cradles. Christina’s Florida cups the turtle in foam
then shimmies its shoulders and flicks moonbeams at skinny dippers. On
the night before her wedding, she was dreaming of a heat-dappled
canopy that would be hers. Now she sleeps under top-heavy, smooth-trunk
trees and strange blooms in a little temple with lemon-topped pillars and idols
wreathed in orange with open mouths breathing wet and hot to save energy
for guttural chanting in the night: those ancient prayers for Christina and her
mother who chanted on holy days in Leyte before tending chicken coops on
the farm. She still chants on Sundays, though it is Tuesday in the tallest fronds
when Christina looks in the center of a baby banana cluster and finds a decadent
object neither symmetrical nor round, but tear-shaped and unyielding. She cuts
down the bunch and sap comes in rivulets down her arm, so much more than sugar.
I dream of the banana heart and the rest of the fruits Christina grows in the temple
garden where you can’t tell if you’re in Cocoa Beach or the Visayas and I may never
grow a banana heart of my own, so I remind her to document blossoms that announce
fruits and spend lots of time in the trees. The bananas are the nest, and she the egg.
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Contributor Notes
Rita Mookerjee is an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Women's and Gender Studies Program at Iowa State University. Her poetry is featured in Juked, Aaduna, New Orleans Review, Sinister Wisdom, and the Baltimore Review. She is the author of the chapbook Becoming the Bronze Idol (Bone & Ink Press, 2019). Rita is both the Sex and Poetry Editor at Honey Literary as well as the Assistant Poetry Editor of Split Lip Magazine, and a poetry staff reader for [PANK].
