La Cama Tiene Candela, or The Bed Is on Fire 1
Would you believe me if I told you
she loved me, she loved me even
with perejil on her breath. She said,
I was her garden of Hibiscus,
of Bayahibe Roses. She kissed
my forehead. A bell was ringing.
A light flickered and in it, our arms:
the same deep brown like wet earth
cradling the Massacre River.
Would you believe me if I told you
she slept beside me every night
since gliding her finger across
my teeth to memorize my smile?
The landscape cloaked in plum
and restless but she'd say sleeping
with me was like swaying in tall grass,
under the moon-sun, pelicans preening
nearby. She professed she loved me
tonight, tomorrow night, yesterday too,
over and over the lap of jade waves.
Come, she'd say, into this field
of soft sea grass perfumed with charcoal,
perfumed with rosemary, a row
of palms for shade. Believe a love
like this is possible. That I could
follow music in her voice beside
a drumming in mine. That my sugar
tamed the salt of her words. To sleep,
she begged, beside the only person
she ever loved. She said this with
perejil rolling off her tongue,
a tongue promising to gift me
cetaceans, jellyfish-scarves,
starfish rings, sometimes blood.
A tongue that convinced me: sleep is
a gentle swing, gentle back and forth,
a tangle of our toes, tangle
of fingers, tangle of snakebirds
in borderless places we'd played before.
Believe me, we rewrote the story
of our island. We laughed in bed,
debating if we were two wings
from the same bird, or the bird itself?2
Notes
1. Bachata song by Robin Cariño.
2. Image and concept from Manuel Rueda's "Cantos de la frontera" (Songs from the Border), from La criatura terrestre (The Land-Being) (1963).
Feature Date
- February 17, 2021
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Copyright © 2020 by Ines P. Rivera Prosdocimi
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Seshu Badrinath
Ines P. Rivera Prosdocimi is a poet, comparatist, and Caribbeanist. Her poetry collection, Love Letter to an Afterlife (Black Lawrence Press, 2018), was a finalist for the 2019 International Latino Book Awards (Best Poetry Book) and the 2019 Binghamton University Milt Kessler Poetry Book Award. Recently, her work has appeared in The American Poetry Review, The Caribbean Writer, New Letters, The New York Times Magazine, and Wasafiri. She holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Maryland and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from American University. She teaches literature at the University of Hartford.
Nov/Dec 2020
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
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