Coming upon another mountain

She smoked him out on the forked mangrove path up a sloped, caved elevation. He was wearing a white billowing shirt and camel linen pants. Dark plum juice stained his hands, so that at first she thought he had killed someone, hurt someone, someone. She sat observing from a nestled col or peak. What was important was that her view was from above. He wouldn’t stop eating the plums. They were big-toe sized plums with reedy stalks and black slick flesh. He thinks he’s a bear sometimes, she whispered in the belly of her throat. Thinks he can grab and stuff, grab and stuff. He was a globe, a mountain, a hard shell. His mountain-mouth became a rubbed out black mark on a fresh page. Sliding two plums between her fore- and middle-fingers like a pool cue, she perched just out of view near the estuary’s edge. Later, she cut out thousands of o’s in the bloodied meat dish her mountain-mother had thrown away from the mince bubbling on the stove. She wrinkled her nose at the smell, puckered like the itching back of a wild pig.

Elizabeth Welsh

Elizabeth Welsh is an editor and poet. She has recently returned from living in London for the last five years. Currently, she is working on her first poetry collection.