Phebus Etienne (1965-2007)

A strange set of coincidences led me to the poems of Phebus Etienne on Tuesday night. For an hour, I was reading her poems and re-reading them. There was something so fresh, urgent, sad and simple, tender and hard, all at once, about them. Then I found out she passed away last week. 41 years old. Such sadness. So strange how an hour before, she meant nothing to me and, an hour later, she means something to me. Elizabeth Alexander, who knew Phebus through Cave Canem, told me that they're trying to get Phebus' manuscript published. I hope it does get to print. In the meantime, please read her poems. Her other poems can be found in The Butterfly's Way: Voices From The Haitian Dyaspora in the United States, Paterson Literary Review, Lips, The Best of Callaloo: Poetry, and Gathering Ground.

Avenues Revisited

The boy who kissed me when I was twelve
was living in the same house with his brothers
who hadn't left or died. He showed me
my old playground at St. Anne,
took me to a museum stocked with photos of artifacts.

He asked what I found beautiful
about home. I pointed to the mountains
browning in the heat, the merchants
who made songs when pricing their goods.

Standing with his back to the rail
on my hotel balcony, he said his father
was killed by ten assassins on his doorstep,
bullets piercing the beige khaki
that had been armor under Duvalier.
He listed his losses, attempts to flee,
and asked me to think more of him, to marry him.

Here, where U.N. soldiers guard the streets from gun towers,
no gesture is without purpose.
The men who line the road will smile
and invite you to browse, then become angry
when you do not buy the peeling leather
or the bread shaped like fish and covered with flies.
An unmarried woman, a resident of the States,
should be ready to wed a man,
if she really means to help.
No gown of Thai silk, just a civil ceremony.
An expression of friendship and thanks,
at the very least, for three days
of company and safe passage.

I went home for particular colors,
the iron pots grating on burning coals
as conch meat simmered,
goat bells mingling with car horns,
to find words that I have forgotten.

I gave what I could,
tracing the scars he received for being
his father's son, his skin familiar,
like warm water clinging to my navel after a bath.
At sunrise, a moss green lizard skittered
along the window, then paused
as if it, too, heard the engine of a plane in the distance,
heading toward the airport where I entered and would leave.