Living Dangerously

“The voodoo priestess can kill you
And she does not even need to be anywhere near you.”
I am sitting in the back of a pick up truck
Against the tailgate
Because here I am in Haiti,

Living dangerously.

“It is hard for you to understand their magic.

Because you are not of here.”
The women with me in the back of the truck are American too.
They are skeptical.
We are always so skeptical of things we don’t understand.

“People in the rural areas,” his English perfect,

his accent perfectly Haitian, “they believe everything is voodoo.
But it is not everything.”
One of the women in the truck bed with us speaks up,
“Maybe they can kill people,
because people believe in it.”

Our young host looks down as if trying to find a connection

In the grooved floor of the truck bed.
There is none there either.
“You are probably safe,
you are not from here," he decides.

"But we are of this land,

This soil is in our bones.”

A car pulls up behind us and the headlights frame the dark outline of my head

And shoulders

Until my reflection in the back window of the truck

Looks like I am

The absence of light.

“Yes, you are probably safe.

Still

If you see a white woman on a horse

Or a black dog that is unusually large,

Do not go home.

Do not go to sleep.

Just in case.”