Florence Upon Arrival in Colón

Meh wicked mother bruk meh  
outta school fi wipe pickney mouth. 

Care fa meh sister’s baby  
likkle ting still suckling tit.  

No, dem nah teach me to read.  
Just teach me to cook cow foot.

Meh iron till meh hand tuff  
even iron bed topcoat.  

All day meh up in bush,  
grow yuca and punkin.  

Tun up ground till da sun a burn meh  
All of dat when meh only seven yuh see. 

All a dem meh leave.  
Dem bare face skin up dem teeth. 

Meh want nutin’ meh leave.  
Dem can dash away!

In a Night, Great-Grandmother Florence Turns My Tongue a Burnt Parchment

Our bent broken  
sable hails, the knead in.  
There was is so many  
worn-in sallow wombs  
toil-kindled mouths. We  
become landscape  
A vessel surrendered. A  
metamorphosizing  
crescent. Fresh wombs  
we know old. This whole  
forgotten/ this our  
sand shorn woven.    

The Second Night, Florence Turns My Tongue a Flaming Bush 

Aaa aannnnnn guish.  
Anger. Aroma  
drenched cloth  
for saintly tautologies.  
Candle-piqued reveries  
toward pyroclastic  
possibilities. Ink-bitten  
invocations are our  
holy interventions.    

The third night, Florence turns my ear a glowing coal  

Of fragrant groans  
or fragment moans.  
Here me red calling  
sorrow flapping  
swallow’s rapping.  
You rattling corpse me  
in hook-snatch  
thank blues 

Shyanne Figueroa Bennett is a Brooklyn poet with roots in Panama, Jamaica, and Puerto Rico. Her work is published or forthcoming in Green Mountains Review, Oversound, The Acentos Review, and The New York Quarterly, among other places. She graduated with an MFA in Writing from Columbia University, where she also received a Chair’s Fellowship and a Creative Writing Teaching Fellowship.