Naranjito
Abu, dozing in a satin chemise, drifting away in a hammock knotted to her balcony, dissolves back into the green mountain-- her dreams quilting a hillside-- patchwork façades of houses. Green homes cataract down high slopes to Río de Plata. Jade, lime, mint, green papaya, sea-washed glass, the brightest green of young iguanas-- thus camouflaged, each house dematerializes. On the green checkerboard of the basketball cancha, teens playing keep-away jump for a last inside hand lay-up and then swallow themselves down into the green of beer bottles. Skateboarders jump green ramps, sailing up green staircases. La guaguita de los dulces, a van selling mazorcas, pastelitos and budín de pan fades into a green ravine, siphoning off its subsiding bullhorn song. Naranjito’s green jumping spiders boing off car windshields, landing in clerodendrum flowers. It’s quiet now inside the mountain, where they have all gone. In his green kareoque bar, Vicente holds an open jar to one ear and hears weather patterns, clouds walking the high ridges, no grind of industry or clamor of metal, just mist and things sprouting, underworld water filtering through karst, water chords tuned by cave rocks. Even the painters who wear fatigues and splash rollers into their great buckets of green, finally paint themselves into the upstairs corners of the grand houses of descendants of coffee barons and the small casitas of children of coffee pickers. They vanish. In El Cerro de Naranjito, a pueblo built by coffee, an aroma of drying and roasting beans, coffee highs and delirium tremens did not drive architects to make even one flourish, one frilled cornice or fluted balustrade. Each pueblo of this isle has its postcard plaza and cathedral, a line of Seville orange trees where men and women whisper piropos, promises scented by blossoms, haloed by bees, but not here in Naranjito. A range of mountains cradles box row buildings, the ugly gauntlet of this town. Obreros of the cafetales dreamed of endurance until Hurricane San Felipe uprooted their lives. Paint it all back into the mountainside. En la montaña, in a green maroonage, families gather at the community centre to remake the pueblo in their image, to find the cemí of these mountains. At just the right angle, in just the right light, the hill looks pixelated. Green monk parakeets fly into green walls, bruising wings and dropping feathers. Sometimes artifacts are found by visitors looking for Naranjito, a framed portrait of a mother’s lost son, a few Goya cans of petit pois, a quiet radio singing, vámonos pa’l monte, vámonos pa allá. Loretta Collins Klobah Loretta Collins Klobah is a professor of Caribbean Literature and creative writing at the University of Puerto Rico. Her poetry collection The Twelve-Foot Neon Woman (Leeds: Peepal Tree Press, 2011) received the 2012 OCM Bocas Prize in Caribbean Literature in the category of poetry and was short listed for the 2012 Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection in the Forward poetry prize series. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Best American Poetry 2016, BIM, Caribbean Beat Magazine, The Caribbean Writer, The Caribbean Review of Books, Poui: The Cave Hill Literary Annual, Susumba’s Book Bag, Moko: Caribbean Arts and Letters, WomanSpeak, TriQuarterly Review, Quarterly West, Black Warrior Review, The Missouri Review, The Antioch Review, Cimarron Review and Poet Lore.
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October 2024
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