Once   On the island, heat is everywhere except in mamma, except in tile under your bare feet.  In the hot kitchen, there is a cooking woman.  Outside, the ocean beats the beach.  Before a mirror, beauty combs her hair.  In that house we eat mango, papaya, rockfish, casaba.    Pots sweat; we all sweat.  The milkman rattles up to bring cool cream in narrow-necked glass bottles, clinking in their wire carry-basket like brass coins.  I am the child of here, of swelter and sea grass, raised by calm outsiders, bathed in island talk, the gossip that confirms the place of man and mule.    Remember then, how so much yak would get around from mouth to mouth?  How no one noticed, caught in every body else’s news, the children how quick even small ones were to catch milk bottles by the neck, run off.    This is my once upon a time, the mystery in what happened after the terrazzo stairs, the startled scream, the mess.  After the milkman Gus, sprints from his gossip, sweeps me up and stuffs my wrist and carries me out back beyond pig sty and oleander to the truck while on my arm, a rag turns red and in the house, the cook must get her mop and swab away the mingled milk and blood.     © Wendy Carlisle