We’re a fleshy circle of
beached bachelorettes,
tramp-stamps fading, bent
over mini Boursins and Bordeaux
brought down from the room
on top of a resort on top of a reef:

the garlic-breathed fruit of four thousand years
of human habitation,
from the good old Aceramics,
the Taíno, fluorescing,
and tireless reincarnations of colonizers to
the new ground-sloths, the new giant island shrew:

you, sunburnt, evolved, sipping rum and corn syrup
from a purple plastic penis straw—
barbasco to sacred vomit sticksv to Tylenol factories to this
sludge-filled veiny verisimilitude—
wondering how you landed yourself here:

bridesmaid, la isla, Borinquen, a fortified interrobang
trimmed in a Whore-Glo faux-feather boa
as Russian businessmen
offer you their warm Coronas,
when all your life you’ve just been
trying to make some progress.