Cooking Up String Beans & Squash Flowers, Circus School & Madame Blavatsky

1. Read with a clean conscience
2. After giving birth be sure the newborn did not sprout a tail.

Saturnino de Brito
& Lal Arifa
in any city square
any humid summer,
the best idea
go tumble by the Hudson
or go back
to her apartment
engender
undying animal
acts initiate
rumbling sky.
“Have you heard
of Madame Blavatsky?”
de Brito asked on
more than one occasion.
“Was she
not responsible
for bringing wicked power
to the nazis?” Lalla asked.
This conversation
they had before,
but this
a new development.
an exchange to move
the dust particles
doing what dust does
in the window-
filtered daylight.
De Brito’s reply
came out static
as a loud pair of Nikes
arrhythmic
clomped upstairs.
“Erishan!”
Erishan Tanaka
from the hall with a huff
emerges mauve steel
bicycle over her shoulder
like one of those guys
on the street
balancing buckets
or baskets from a single pole.
“’Sup.”
“Yosup Erishan!?
Ogenki desu ka”
de Brito said.
“Hey, Niner.
Comment ça va?”
“Ya wernt in classe today.
Just kiddeen
I wasn’t eether.”
(Something you can’t see.)
“Nah.
I’m straight.”
“Word.
Let’s match. Brother
Kenna came by last night.”
“Aw that fool? He got some
weird scar on his face from dat
tribal shit, right?”
“He’s from Mali.
His grandmother did that.
It’s an honor.”
“Damn.
That cat’s skinny.”
Lalla pulled out
a Pacific-centric world
map no less
than four feet wide and three feet tall
Unrolled it before De Brito
as though a sacred scroll
discovered down some alley
or on a lower
eastside sidewalk chillin’
in a free pile.
She weighted each corner
one shoe, one roll of packing tape,
a colored pencil box,
and a book of human
anatomy. I imagine
De Brito felt claustrophobic from looking
at all that
canned expanse. Once again
he saw blue
between them.
She pulled
a pair of black shoestrings—
with which she failed
to properly lace her kung fu
shoes—from her closet.
She placed
one aglet tip
at the cluster of Cabo
Verde (off the west
coast of Africa) and the other
at Aringay (on the west coast
of the Philippines).

“Same
latitude,” she says.

Island
people.