Armed with a cutlass, gift from my uncle, a displaced
cane cutter in Belle Glade, before La Migra swooped
down one Friday evening, like Shangó’s vengeance
on adulterers and deported him to Jamaica
before we could hire a lawyer, I opened the gate
to my garden and began the yearly ritual at the end
of hurricane season, to clear weeds that had sprouted
along my fence, choking mint, cerasee, sage,
and discover a golden orb weaver—“banana spiders,”
which my cousin, Drew and I, boys from Westmoreland
would call them—had woven in the midst of this emptiness,
a net in every direction to snare heedless insects that swarm
between the plantain’s and papaya’s rotting fruit, a web
as intricate as Eshu’s riddle in the multiplying lines of my palm.
Born in Jamaica, Geoffrey Philp is the author of the forthcoming novel, Garvey’s Ghost. His work is represented in nearly every anthology of Caribbean literature, and he is one of the few writers whose work has been published in the Oxford Book of Caribbean Short Stories and the Oxford Book of Caribbean Verse. A graduate of the University of Miami, where he earned an MA in English, Geoffrey teaches creative writing at Miami Dade College.
