Private Island
On this private island we take turns
collecting coconuts. There’s always dry
frizz to your hair, the ocean steeping
your curls in a salty stiffness, and when
you cry about it, I hold you. At night,
you read me a 1000-page fantasy novel
that you’ve rewritten since our relocation
to the island, rewritten word-for-word
in the sand. When the wind takes
it away, we write our own novel, this time
with you asking: What does the character
want? and me, stupefied: Want? He
is in a post-apocalyptic dreamscape,
and his friends are aliens. Want?
In this way, we feud. You sleep in
so I have to rebuild the hut, the night’s
storm wreaking havoc to our banana
leaf den. I throw banana leaves
at you, although we both know
that I’m the only one who can do it properly,
anyways. When you touch me,
quiet, under shade, with the cicadas muffled
by the tree cover, I feel like a shell
that you have found by the tide, I feel soft
and rigid in the right places, sculpted by sea
and air, found and held for once and for all.
We find so many shells and make so much art.
I do necklaces and earrings, and you
make sinister masks by wiring the shells together.
We scare the pigs on the island, our masks
flailing and self-destructing as we run
through the forest. Finally, we make
a sundial out of mounded clay and elephant tusk.
We have yet to see any elephants. We think
they left on a raft before us, before
the island became ours. We discover time
this way, the shadows enumerating the days
of our existence together. Then we don’t
know what to do with ourselves. We run
around the island, hoping to find some kind
of hatch to another world, another island.
I hoard the pigs in the banana den, count
them and realize that there are less days
than pigs, and that soon, the private island
will blow up and fall away into the sea,
melt down into the deepest, darkest
corners of the ocean, and with it: our
novel, our leaf hut, our pigs, our masks.
In the horizon we vaguely make out
the outline of another island, perhaps
one with cows instead of pigs, with sand dollars
and sea glass treasured within it, you
wonder. We build a boat for one, and
I stock you up with plenty of supplies
for the journey. The sundial tells me
it is dusk when I send you off. I am anxious
after your departure, and I sit in the cold
hut. In the corner you have left me a pig mask,
so I get up and decide to find my friends.