You breath in gray dust—powdered pebbles that have mixed with exhaust from a truck whizzing by, sinking under the weight of 30 people balancing baskets full of plantain on their heads, sitting on 100 pound bags of rice, and holding sugar cane. After the dust settles, dry cow dung that blew into the air from the side of the road stays in your nose like the guest who doesn't realize when the party is over.
You are breathing in lemon zest air on top of one of the hundred leafy mountain heads that stares down at the ocean around Hispaniola. The air is purified water frozen into an ice cube, you breathe some and your lungs take twice their share, stretching their maximum capacity like a 6-year old boy sitting down to his favorite meal with fruit punch followed by birthday cake. Mango leafs exhale sugary oxygen into your nostrils and you devour it. If your sense of smell is very acute, you might catch one or two goat hairs in the leafy coolness.
Trash melts into charcoal, puffing clouds of rotten campfire into your nasal canals. You breathe a pig rolling in waste, his slobber turning to steam in the heat of the sun’s smolder; motionless brown water under a bridge made of dirt, painting misty air with fumes of human feces.
It is the crusty crisping of plantain slices and accra bubbling in hot yellow oil, flipping under the metal scooper in the right hand of a sweating woman. Her dress strap slipped off her left shoulder that supports a full head of black frazzles belonging to her naked baby. Inside your nose burns when green chilies in the accra batter spit into the oil’s hot breath.
The sun sizzles your skin red till it wears the scent of toast and tanning beds. Sweat evaporates from your shirt leaving old sneaker perfume on your chest and in between your shoulder blades.
It is salt water soaked fish splashing sea urchin body odor around the edges of the moist wood boat that rocks you through a chorus of ocean ripples singing, "Shh” as you travel from sand grains to banana trees on an Island that appears the size of a cupcake sprinkle on the map of Haiti.
