Portside

What She Could Carry

It all fit in her arms

and the basket that hung from the handlebars,

a rusted castoff

whose creaking spokes clamored

for the voices of a scarce tomorrow

after years beneath the Plantain tree,

equatorial torrents,

and open-sky sun.

Her infant child, strapped to her back;

some yucca, avocado, and coffee grinds wrapped

in the rapidity of alarm;

her mother’s portrait;

and a book of poems

she hoped she could someday learn to read,

that her husband regardless

brought her, wrapped in ribbon

from the city,

on the day he first kissed her

on the same riverbank to which he’d gone to fish

only to be eight months late for supper.

Rumors slapped her cheek for weeks

that he’d been taken to an unmarked grave

and handed a shovel

but there was no word otherwise,

despite her dawn-break pleas

perforating the hours up through

starless night wondering

that drained her breasts of their certainty

and left a bitter taste on her child’s tongue.

She rides the velocity of violence

peddling the dirt road to

some semblance of safe

after gunshots deafened the sugarcane,

untaming death and its havoc,

and the neighbor’s cattle came running,

unsettled, aflame:

the fabric of fecund days, deracinated.

Erosions of history tattoo themselves into her skin,

numbing erasure,

a cruel wind knotting her hair, and

the splintered tires traverse

under the weight of

infant, poetry,

and dread

toward a cosmopolitan horizon

where the extermination

of home and birdsong

rises from the blistering pavement.

*This poem references the violence of enforced disappearance and forced displacement that is rampant in Colombia. Colombia has over 50,000 reported disappearances, and about 5 million internally displaced. The Colombian military and its contingent, state-sanctioned, illegal armed groups are responsible for roughly 85% of human rights violations, including these.

Heidi Andrea Restrepo Rhodes is a queer, mixed-race, second-generation Colombian immigrant, writer, scholar, artist, and activist. Her poetry has been seen or is forthcoming in a number of literary journals and anthologies, including Kudzu House Review, As/Us, Feminist Studies Journal, Nepantla, Yellow Medicine Review, Write Bloody’s ‘We Will Be Shelter’, and others. She currently lives in Brooklyn.