Postcard prose – Issue 6 | August 2009
Getting Rich
by Deborah Diemont
In my third floor office, teak desk planed like a sailboat, I think of Russell, Rasta fisherman, Belize.
Barefoot, he ambled on the sand in a drawstring bathing suit. Dreadlocks shot around his face in all directions—a child’s happy drawing of the sun. I paid him twenty bucks to take me snorkeling at the reef. A bonus: I watched him dive for conch. After slipping to the sea floor he would burst through the surface, hands reaching over the starboard to slam-dunk the shells. One by one, he tapped them loose with his knife, slicing them, stunned and white, into ceviche.
Take me to America, he winked. If I am cold, I will build me a Styrofoam house. Save the avocado pit from your lunch, Miss. I’ll grind it later, eat some to get high. The bud of hibiscus, he sighed, can bring a vision on, too. He told me fruit and fish made him lithe and fast as antelope, and that scientists overlook garlic—the cure for HIV. On the stern of his boat, chipping paint stuck to my skin, everything he said I could believe.
About the author
For most of Deborah Diemont’s adult life, the word “traveled” and “lived” have coincided, her maximum stay in any location being three years. She has recently settled in Syracuse, New York, after three years living in San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas, Mexico. Her poems have appeared in The Evansville Review, Lucid Rhythms, The Texas Review, and other journals.
Read our current issue, Issue 6 | August 2009:
Poetry
Berlin by Sy Margaret Baldwin
Two Poems by Sean Edgley
After Your Funeral I Set Out to Find You in Different Time Zones by Jennifer Faylor
Painter by Ricky Garni
Other Than by Dana Guthrie Martin
Two poems by Timothy Kercher
Five Views of Guanajuato: A Mythology by Athena Kildegaard
Two poems by Mary Kovaleski Byrnes
Goya by Trent Nutting
The Changing of the Flowers by Jennifer Saunders
Two poems by Ken Turner
Postcard prose
Buttons by Jennifer Faylor
The Enemy Tree by Kirby Wright
Escape on the Canal by Addie Zierman
