I hear it, or some variation, whenever I cut across the corner wedged between coffee shop, liquor store, and the yield running off Osborne Street to River Avenue.
On my first visit home to Barbados, I stayed with Mum and her sister Vi, aptly known as the widowed dragons.
A hundred naked young men sat on a concrete floor, my seventeen-year-old self included.
When my 16-year-old was getting ready to see his friends, a knot developed in my gut.
I sashay into the bathroom, humming an upbeat tune.
Tall but awkward, I have always loved playing basketball.
Multiple construction deadlines and a meeting in five minutes.
“Tell me a story,” I ask.
Teri Boland commanded two friends to chase after me during recess.
I opened the refrigerator and crawled inside.
Reading what Natasha inscribed on the new mug she made—Every time you learn something new, you become a better version of yourself—I learned something new about her.
The bell chides my lateness, coffee spills from my cup, and papers scatter to the floor.
You are the pepper shaker and I am a napkin.
I, Lekeila, run to dampen the flames as our spaceship hurtles toward the surface of the moon.
At night lying naked on my bed, age eleven or twelve, breeze through the window screen cooling on my skin.
The buskers ran late like the husbands buying cheap chocolate boxes across the street.
My father won't reconcile with the sea, though he grew up on an island unafraid of rogue waves, of hurricanes.
The evening unfolds as all others—light fades and a quiet falls like weight.
Off of 51st Avenue, we walk along the train tracks, balancing, bumping into each other on purpose just to feel the touch.
My nose still feels the burn of the smoke from my grandma’s cheap cigarette as it wafted through the air of her white 1994 Mercury Sable.