Poems by Leslie McGrath

At Sea

When at last we reached the wrought iron gate
and the taxi driver strained to find the button
that would give us entry, I read !Peligro!
beneath the skull and crossbones on the sign
Poisonous snakes will make a meal of you  My casita stood just below the mountain peak, where cicadas buzzed in dark electric. More tired than hungry,  I lay on the bed still dressed in traveling clothes and slept.  Winds rifled up the mountain, tearing philodendron, flinging limes to the dirt but it was the bamboo’s thrash and creak that made me dream the sea.I was lashed to a raft in a storm, green heat and black-lacquered sky. The sea took me up, the sea threw me down-- sea of nightmares, jungle sea.  It’s easy in another country, where one is a stranger, to believe it’s the setting that unsettles sleep when it’s the bags we carry on our backs like tortoises, visible to others but unseen to us, that come unlatched in travel

artwork by Callie Hirsch

Llueve, Huevos, Jueves

“How do you like your fried Thursdays?” “It looks like it’s going to eggs.”

In the pueblo I want to buy string and ask instead for clothing.

Flustered at the sales girl’s laughter, I tell her I’m embarrazada--

she congratulates me on my pregnancy.  Foreign words wear masks

of false likeness in dozens of similar shades of sound:
llueve, huevos, Jueves         it’s raining, eggs, Thursday

Spanish sits heavy in the mouth.  My tongue tires
and the bony chapel of my skull echoes like it’s empty.

I’ll learn.  I’ll have Spanish as Spanish has me:  by the throat.

When the time’s right.  When it’s raining eggs on Thursday