If we need more

It is a trip home
for migrants in two or more halves.
My thin straw has siphoned out
this coconut’s life-giving juice: afterbirthy
and sweet.
The bellied man with the machete split it,
his hands fat with dead skin. His face is a handbag,
UVA-seasoned–thanks to the hole in the clouds,
he’s seared to a brown that goes with everything.
I was nine. But the bellied men
gathered the soft rubber above their shorts
to sit with a soapy beer and protest
machete-based working conditions. Too many a good finger
lost, you know–
I have these coconut halves
and I want this to be pleasing, for you.
Like scraping meat from this surgical patient,
tilting white flesh into the valley of your tongue.
A valley
so that this stuff–textured somewhere
between an egg and whatever it is, I don’t know,
around a wet chia seed–
would get there.
Sometimes the stuff is known to slide
past your teeth and slip into the hole
between your gums that is fleshier,
and more remote.