Thirty years the rifle slept in the
woman’s hands like a child learning
to pray. Jacarandas spilled their blue
grief along boulevards the colonists
half-finished & abandoned to the
slow patience of weather.

Listen—the espresso machines still
hiss in the cafés, same fricative as
memory. Down at the harbor the
water keeps a private ledger of
phosphorus, of the boys who
learned to swim by drowning.

My grandmother roasts green to
black over coals older than the
borders, & the smoke makes a small
flag nobody saluted. In the trenches
up north they sang in a tongue built
from honey & sand. The hyena was
its own kind of psalm.

Frankincense & gunmetal— the
highlands taught the body two ways
of burning. Somebody’s father is still
walking out of the photograph
toward the camel-bell, the camel, the
long red road wherever the dust
agrees to settle.

The sycamore figs drop their small
dark commas into the white page of
the road.