Blown cheek of the roof, ulcer and teal, gas pipe and cherub.

The radiator prays for warmth. As in life, my uncle’s body

is raised like a newborn. People are gentle with him, speak slowly.

Black feathered congregation missed breakfast sharpening their shoes.

My cousin throws a low grin between the pews and we play

muffled had, skidding along the rows as though sitting still.

Until the singing, I had been thinking of that warm night

legs slung over either side of the church wall, ankles locked

with my lover drinking Stella, the song said I am here,

I don’t have to worry, you can see your tears. Can I open my mouth

and say such things, can I let this song see me cry?

My cousin went up to the body, alone, and looked.

She turned to me. The answer, as it is in heaven:

something about a child with its hands over its face.

Ha-my-ca

My mother and her boyfriend had gone

to see a man about a dog again.

The taxi driver turned to me and asked

whether I knew that ‘Jamaica’ was from Spanish,

ha-my-ca, he said, ha-my-ca.

Had I asked what name it had before

I might have learned a word for my body, not felt so alone

later, dropping into that cold green pool at the hotel;

low season, no-one but us on the deckchairs all day

until sunfall when I let my swimsuit slip down my shoulder,

float on my back, starbathe under ursa minor.

This hour,

when Ocho Rios smiles between the trees like a gold-tooth aunty,

I let my swimsuit slip to my waist, let the evening tongs

twist my nipples, make them cold and constellate.

In these late hours I have learned to spit pool water

like a cartoon fish, how to flounder at the bottom

of the pool like a tabloid news story, how to make my glass

of coke last all day so that only now am I groping for it

in the dark, sucking its last flat buzz. The pool lights come on.

I clamber onto the lilo with its pink panther head,

let my swimsuit slip down my legs, bubble up behind me,

faff and squeak below the sole light in the hotel:

five stories up, my mother appears on the balcony,

hanging something wet to dry / I leap into the water,

bob naked, like a brown bottle with a sodden note.

I learned of self and other when my waist left the water

and my mother, up there in the dark, waited another hour

before she called us up. She and he barely touched us

when we came, wet, with wrinkled hands and feet.

Ha-my-ca. Package deal; three nights in Ochi –

One, the kid undresses in the darkening ha.

Two, in its hands, soft water, it parts on my.

Three, to re-surface, to twin at the tail on ca.

That other way of saying it, that other way to understand.