Bound
She cut the shoes off her brothers’ feet, and fastened the soles on her own.
—Jean Godin des Odonais, in a letter about his wife Isabel, who travelled 3,000 miles through the Amazon to reunite with him after a separation of twenty years; of the forty-three people in her party, only she survived
Jean I left my brothers’ bodies in the dirt
with their eyes still open their eyes thick with flies
I could not bear to shut them red-eyed flies crawling
to drink my brothers’ dew flies burrowed in the blight
that was my brothers
I lay down with them for two days but could not die
could never my heart went on knocking all the same
it drowned out the choir of our children crying mama
when they died Jean it knocked
heavy as a pestle while you were trapped in Cayenne
in Cayenne I will regrow my skin and hair years ago
we sat beneath the jarina trees watching the flies buzz
over the fruit and I taught you how to tie the quipu
with handfuls of white grass with my black braids
we tied the quipu for two and your shirt smelled
astonishing as sour as old rain they have even taken
the skin from my lips
I spit blood to say your name to say Jean I rattle
a coarse grain of rice in my throat till it scratches
and makes sound
and give my blood to the flies I took only the soles
of their shoes and a seed from Eugenio’s mouth
that he never finished chewing and it tasted sweet
as the dew settling cool upon
my brothers’ faces turn to bowls of cold mazamorra and
I eat them flies and all on rolls of cold paper
you would sketch the blue macaws eating clay by the river
and holler their songs through the house till the baby
laughed
in Cayenne I will they walk ahead of me in clean clothes
and hide when I Heloise Joachim Rosa Eugenio
Eugenio their naked feet there is no maid no baby no
brothers was never any sound but the knock
the flies like your macaws I eat clay I have peeled
and eaten each of my fingernails in turn and they tasted
better than our wedding dinner I tied the vines full
of figure-eight knots broke my hand open
with a pestle to feed them
my brothers the flies chorusing your name in high voices
Anna Kelley is pursuing an MFA in poetry at Syracuse University. She is a reader for Salt Hill. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Citron Review, Literary Orphans, Up the Staircase Quarterly, CICADA, Split Lip Magazine, and others.