Afrobeat Journal Issue 2 : Spring 2011

by Marcia Douglas

A boy on the Babylon bus to country throw his empty bag-juice
through the window. His mother floor so clean, you
could eat rice and peas off it
and she home-train him good because he know better
than to soil up his good-shirt with bag syrup after it wash and
bleach so long on the zinc.

But listen judgment.

The juice-bag land in the Garden of Jah,
covering the mouth of an angel’s trumpet flowers
three days and three nights it stay, till
a breeze of remembrance blow it out to the beach where it
swallow salt-water,
a piece of red thread and
the condom that Roderick, the coconut wata man, did dash-wey after he

Up by the road, Ras Haile-I on his bicycle chants this song, boil your wata/ if you have to
And the bag with Roderick juice still in it, catch
a blue wave and ride froth at the tail-end of a fisherman’s boat
out to a school of rainbow-colour fish, one of them
so foolish as to yawn.

Later a woman named after a book of hunger,
pick up the dead fish wash up on the beach,
slits its side,
to clean it for her children’s dinner.

boil your wata/ if you have to

That’s when she find it Roderick’s condom.
In the fish-belly.
“But see here!”

Somewhere the juice bag still floats in the sea wondering
at the fool-foolishness of fish and
Roderick babymother searches for a piece of red thread and
a boy’s mother rakes up mango leaf and makes the yard a holy scripture.

Who is Marcia Douglas?

Marcia Douglas was born in England and grew up in Jamaica. She is the author of the novels, Madam Fate (Soho, 1999) and Notes from a Writer’s Book of Cures and Spells (Peepal Tree Press, 2005) as well as a collection of poetry, Electricity Comes to Cocoa Bottom (Peepal Tree Press, 1999) which received a Poetry Book Society Recommendation in the U.K.

Her work has appeared in anthologies and journals internationally including The Oxford Book of Caribbean Verse (Stewart Brown and Mark McWatt eds.,) Mojo: Conjure Stories (Nalo Hopkinson, ed.,) Enlaces: Transnacionalidad- El Caribe y su Diáspora- Lengua, Literatura y Cultura en los Albores del Siglo XXI (Linda Rodríquez Guglielmoni and Miriam González Hernández, eds.,) Whispers from under the Cotton Tree Root (Nalo Hopkinson, ed.,) The Forward Book of Poetry 2000 (Simon Armitage, ed.,) Cultural Activism: Poetic Voices, Political Voices (Gertrude Gonzales and Anne Mammary eds.,) The Edexcel Anthology for GCSE English (Anna Maloney ed.,) and Sisters of Caliban: Contemporary Women Poets of the Caribbean (MJ Fenwick, ed.). Marcia teaches at the University of Colorado, Boulder.