avocados benevolently weighting my palms and
turtles tasting mangoes thrown by farmers.
The lake laps fresh water shark teeth to the bottom of muddy revolutions.
I spread my mother’s ashes
tapping a reserved tapping into my hand from a clear film canister. There is dust and there are larger chunks. Sitting on a fallen tree trunk, suspended above the ground by stubborn limbs, I eat vanilla cookies with the kind of chocolate filling you can roll into a scroll along the stale cookie’s edge.
The local tienda sold these but there are no cows on the island to produce fresh milk.
All the liquid I had was salty and leaking from my cheeks into the film canister.
When the cookies were done, I brushed from my lap crumbs of burned maternal body and stale wheat.
The lake was lapping hard under a clouded blue sky. Back went the film canister into my tan money belt, pushing it’s serrated edge into travelers checks, cordobas, colones, my passport when I zipped the tan zipper.
The grass lashed my bare ankles
tan on the climb back up the hill.