By Anne Christelle Chery

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This piece is inspired by recent events which reminded me of my childhood, growing up in Haiti.

Lately, I have been drinking a lot of lemonade.
I don’t make it much anymore but it’s such a classic drink.
So simple:
Lemons, water, and sugar.
People can get creative with it 
At work 
We have one called pineapple pomegranate lemonade,
A couple days ago at Wendy’s I had a blueberry pomegranate one
Yesterday, pineapple mango 
But the best lemonade I’ve had is apparently not lemonade at all
It’s Jis Sitwon:
Limes, brown sugar, bagged water, ice.
With the sun shining on our heads and sweat dripping down our bodies,
the vendor, the glue of La Ville, uses a pik and chips away
at the melting ice in his beat up cart.
A lime is rubbed around the rim of a stainless steel cup for sanitation,
I look back into the sun questioning its existence
So, I don’t where he gets the water and I can’t remember him making the drink
But before me…lemonade
Or limeade.

The buzzing bees, the guepe is what makes it taste good.

stiring takes forever, to tast

Making Limeade
I hate that everything in America is pre-made,
I don’t make lemonade anymore
can’t remember the last time I made it.
It feels like I have none of the ingredients to make a good lemonade.
Yes, I can go to the market
I can get all the limes and lemons I want,
maybe the organic market will have brown sugar,
water is abundant
overflowing if I keep the faucet running
but nothing beats the monthly walk to get our drinking water.
A years supply of simply lemonade wouldn’t stand a chance
In front of my 5 limes
freshly hand squeezed into a pitcher,
cane sugar out of the tin
a splash of vanilla extract
and half a jug of water, used sparingly.
Later, When the ice man comes around, we will pour ourselves a glass.



It’s all lemonade
Stir,
Stir,
Stir,
it’s a hotter day than usual in Port-au-Prince.
Stir the sugar, 
it sits at the bottom of the cup.
I hear the clink of my spoon against the metal cup
it’s not consistent, the spoon is getting stuck in the mounds of
sugar I tipped in the cup, it takes forever to stir.
Each splash means I get a little less
so I am careful
but regardless there is a pool of the thick sugary mess
sitting outside of the cup threatening to drip down the plastic tapi
and onto the cement floor.
Big black ants line up against the wall awaitng their offering
a while ago I heard the others announce it, so 
I open the freezer, there is ice today
“They gave us electricity”.
So hot even my cup is sweating.
A few handfuls of ice, its ready to drink,
a sip of our limeade will have me colder than a winters day.

Process

Working with my mentor to better understand poetry and poetry writing led to my piece “Made with Lime”. My mentor suggested using a prompt from the Girls Write Now list and we made some samples of a poem using a receipt format. That exercise sparked an idea.