Queenie at the flakes

Queenie knows this sensation:
salt crusting skin, salt catching
in the throat, salt and
fishsmell straight to 
the brain like a cure 
for fainting. Saltfish, same 
cream-and-silver boards
bought and sold by women 
in the bright, brazen markets
of home. 

Has she never wondered
until now just how this fish, netted
in the coldest currents of a distant
ocean, had come to grace her 
breakfast plate each Sunday
of her early life? Had anyone
ever spoken of so much salt 
sailing north as ballast, returning
as barrels of slab-stiff cod? 

In the bowed backs of the women
and girls who clean and salt
and watch and stack the fish, who 
brush away flies and rinse away
maggots, who shield their work
from ruin by rain, from scorching 
by sun, does she glimpse the forms
of those who rake and shovel salt
from West Indian ponds, hands 
swollen to cracking, eyes 
unfixed, awed by the gleaming
white of their harvest?

And does something in her blood 
know the saltfish meals of her country
for what they once were: fodder, 
not food. Fish no good for winter, worse 
again than the scraps these 
salt-skinned folk indulge in?