As such, Radica was an anxious dog guarding a bone,
Or a mellifluous meretricious dog when she had
To grab a bone from or through you: her will was ‘iron clad’,
As she herself proudly told her cronies. To grasp the gist
That, in her most unique of lusts, she was as commonplace
As she wanted to be seen not to be – was not a grace
That had as yet taken root and blossomed in Radica’s
Garden of consciousness
~
‘Don’t let anything
Stop you’, her mother had often told her. ‘Get what you want,
Doesn’t matter what. Don’t let anyone tell you you can’t.
For every pauper princess, dere’s a millionaire king!’
*
But Mona was no monster, no foaming-at-the-mouth cur
Out for the kill. Enemies were only significant
As stiff rungs on life’s ladder; otherwise, irrelevant.
~
‘Irrelevant’ was one of Radica’s favourite words,
Words she collected like defensive weapons or like birds
She kept in a cage but sometimes let out to flash around
Some room (not at home) of colleagues (mostly). She liked the sound
Of their wings as they swished past the whitened bars of her teeth,
Liked to witness their effect on the muscles underneath
The tight skin of the polite faces of often dismayed
Or jealous White boys and girls stunned by the charm she displayed
As she savaged the demotic expectations of their
Tribe’s determination to mean nothing, to never scare
Lest they in turn be scared (or scare off business)
(*fatima solagua arterra’s nudes* by Brian Chan, 2015)
FARJOURNEY CARIBBEAN 