“Exotica” by Rose McLarney

A new poem by Rose McLarney (poetry, ’10) appears online in Mudlark:

Exotica

You don’t want the story about the soft clutch
of monkey’s toes, how monkeys swung

languorous from limbs, showering down fruit.
But rather, the one about how 

the blue-eyed Abando boy’s body hung 
after he was lynched for robbing our house,

for robbing any place ever left empty. 
You are not as interested in fruit—

hearing how it was heavy and pendulous
through the forest, a forest hung 

with bunches of bananas, zapotes that fell
erupting orange custard among rambutans—

as in the way thieves ripped jewelry from women’s
ears, hooks pulled through the lobes, so they hung 

with rubies of blood. You listen more closely 
when I tell of how I clung

to the reins when a drunk whipped my horse
into a frenzy and out, swimming, to sea, 

than of the tame iguana I hung
in a bird cage, fine wire formed into a palace.  

Even though I fed him on hibiscus, 
and could describe so many lush, red flowers,

folding from the mouth.

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