Love Notes from Island Lockdown

by Danielle Boodoo-Fortuné

To close an island, you must first thread the borders
with bits of sea glass, prayer beads, and rusted metal,
blur the map’s blue with your damp open palm. 

The coast is half-blind and prone to drifting.
Your island doesn’t always come back when you call. 
Still, you must forgive its sinking sand
and jagged fault lines. We all have wounds 
from which we cannot heal.

But your small house is an island too,
the silver bowl of risen dough on the windowsill,
the sliver of amber in your son’s right eye

and sometimes the island surfaces in you, 
high and seismic,
like in the middle of this dry month 
when the first wave stills
and the mountain poui gasp in yellow adoration.
 
You want to worship at the peninsula’s throat again,
but the weeks and waves still loom 
so grey and strange in the distance.
 
In the sealed container of home now,
Saharan dust clouds drift and settle.
You find airspaces in the secret hollows of trees,
mark time in the nesting cycles of cornbirds
and the fruiting season of mangoes.

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