Poet Wrestling with the Poetics of Unsolvable Physics

Posted on May 1, 2019 by Rosebud Ben-Oni

Maybe I am writing this to get you to stop
pursuing me, my little vampire bunny— & maybe

these questions aren’t meant to be
solved. Maybe they are playing

you & me like a fork a little too sharply
tuned. Is the true nature of dark energy.

Being a little off is the right kind
of beacon. For eternity.

Owes everything to lust,

the cruelest kind
of swelling that cannot release {release}

& will always cost
any kind of future
{worth remembering}.

Maybe I am. Writing this for you, my sweet, sweet.
But I’m lost. In a bigger thicket of grit & greed

wanting more of itself, just a second longer? Do you ever think

that’s why you’re always hungry. & those love bites aren’t so
tender. & whatever. Force drives you {to spring upon me}

doesn’t yet exist. It’s
okay. To say well, nothing

would change ::you:: {would still. Love me. } I don’t
mind, the attempts to fertilize immortality.

But does perfect pitch lead anywhere & beyond {closing
a circle}? Like tying intricate knot without purpose?

But go on. & anyway. Bind my legs & arms in your infinite & immaculate
vampire bunny charms. & gravity of desire. Isn’t an eternal light left alone

in perfection a life gone stale. I’m betting & only on
defects. & kinks. As what moves anything. Forward. No,

it’s not light. Or reaching.
Apex— not the kind of animal
you pretend to reconcile.
I know the living dead are real.

Every time you kill me.
To prove my protons
Are. Fundamentally stable. Talk is cheap.
As it is small. I’d rather take {chance} & get

gnawed. & chewed & chomped
& become delicious & seduced
as. Evolution. Is. Seriously

screwed. Since questions
seek {out} their own
silencing.

Is that why you bite me {dead},
my little bunny— to turn us
into peculiar
velocity?

Your quantum features seeking my gravity. & maybe
infinitely cottontail & fangs getting caught on

doorways because dark energy says we shouldn’t?
What multiplies when yet still. I arise from torn fur & nails

digging? Maybe it were. Big Bounce more than. Big Bang.

Maybe dry veins
nibble. & one more night
we’re still bloody peas.
& quarks.
& maybe it’s not important.
To the Theory of Everything,

but even after they come for you,

I keep & keep. Seeing. & everywhere,
my sweet little bloodsucking.
How you appear, suddenly,
on trains

popping out of cat carriers & staring
from screened windowsill.
Is that not you purring

at the diner when they serve you up medium-
rare on gilded plate. Skunned & still
bloody. Steam
rising

from the toothpick they speared
into your twitching,
cold heart
& I tear

onto, my tears like the problem
of {capital T} Theory & my ears
like {capital E} Everything. Is

it all over the moment
one gets just close enough
to what is Ultimate
& Final—

is that when Everything is proven. Fatal. Because such proximity
does not lead to anything more
than little vampire bunnies
who were just as human
as the last question
I will eat from my own
swollen & stained lips.

Posted in 91: MONSTER | Tagged

fear and other feelings

Posted on May 1, 2019 by Claire Albrecht 
                         the 
                                     wasp will 
                                                         just 
                                                      not fucking 
                                                                              give up

floats along our old back wall like a drone patrolling we have cut off her access with duct tape a mud house inside she brings caterpillars to feed her young grasping wriggling I think to myself what if I held my head to the boards would I hear them writhing they will die I watch a news report of a dam collapsing all mud and death I do not want to mourn my family ever it has been three soft striped days she will not give up I am sorry

Posted in 91: MONSTER | Tagged

Clones don’t sleep

Posted on May 1, 2019 by Emily Meller

i had a bad dream my clone says what was it you say
– Oscar Schwartz, “what side of the bed does your clone sleep on?”

My clone is acting strangely.
My clone is breathing fast.
How do we know – she says
walking into glass.

My clone thinks we are pregnant
given my tender breasts,
she says we dreamt of anemones
but I don’t remember it.

Convenience stores only stock
tests with teethy women
smiling widely on the box.

You know – my clone says
an oasis faded
is a desert found.
I hear her voice folded
through sheets dipped in waves,
hidden water falling out.

My clone will not panic.
My clone is always calm.
My clone cannot get pregnant.
How do I know – she says.

My clone remembers star jasmine
arched up against our windows,
as it swallowed our fence
and breathed all night against glass.

My clone remembers the coolness of the dive
into my grandfather’s pool.
My clone would never
buy a German car.

At a certain point my clone
will lie with my head against her chest.

She will bite her bleeding lip
and I’ll taste none of it.

Posted in 91: MONSTER | Tagged

ROBIN WRIGHT IN HOUSE OF CARDS OMG

Posted on May 1, 2019 by Emilie Zoey Baker

ROBIN WRIGHT!
Your blonde helmet shines like a Greek god’s whip.
I want to join your army of whatever.
I want to wear that military figure-hugging dress with just a hint of brocade.
Little buttons and hooks wink like a glint of evil in a child’s eye.
You pour down hallways
hang-glide into the Oval Office in your effortless heels.

DAMN.

Your eyes emit an icy breeze as if in an ad for breath mints –
people get cold and glamorous simultaneously.

When you flirt with fake Vladimir Putin
I feel America blush a colour just shy of the old Soviet flag.

Girl.

Kevin Spacey’s ghost was slapped out the window of the White House,
hot hashtags burned into his skin.
Recast as a little bird.
Fuck that guy.

I vote for you with your weaponised feminism.
I vote for you with your fourth-wall sentences that
scissor-glide.
I vote for you with your nasty plans
and occasional murder.

Death threats are as common as Facebook notifications –
whatever.
You dismiss them with arms elegant as a crane landing on a lake.
A secret smile disappears like a coffee bean into milk.
Pregnant with lies, or maybe a girl, who knows, they didn’t renew the series.

Your armour glistens like your teeth,
snake-spine fingers signing bills. Doing business.
First Lady, you had a plan all along.
They pulled your anger out like a doll string
and now it’s time to hear it speak.

But Americans can’t cope with your Khaleesi
the same way they meltdown if they hear
a female voice coming from the cockpit.

When the army recruit said,
Do you have a plan that’s not going to get us all killed?
You said,
Would you ask me that question if I was a man?
No.
HELL NO.
Hell the fuck no, Robin Wright.

We trust you like venom trusts death,
we trust you like a nail trusts penetration,
we trust you like sin trusts guilt.
You got this, you delicious monster.

Posted in 91: MONSTER | Tagged

Who Shot Camilo Catrillanca?

Posted on May 1, 2019 by Juan Garrido Salgado

Who shot Camilo Catrillanca?
It was the antiterrorist law applied by Pinochet.
It was the “anti-terrorist” unit of the Chilean police
Known as Comando Jungla;
Command that trained in the Colombian tropical jungle
With collaboration from the US & Chilean governments.
Or it was the four police members of the JC?
They shed blood on the Wallmapu,
Shooting the Mapuche warrior, calling him a Weifaliche.

He was driving his tractor back home.
He ground the land and built his house
With his hands and his ancestral dreams at sunset.
Land recovered by Mapuche traditional community of Temucuicu.
There was the Weifaliche with a bullet in the head
And his blood spilled on earth.
His eyes are stuck in the beams of his unfinished house.
Walls of love massacred,
Fallen space of dying love,
A roof of sky and stars to protect
The life of their children.

Who shot Camilo Catrillanca?
Who are those armed monsters with hate, thirsty for blood?
They shot to kill, not knowing that his death
Is a seed in the blood of their ancestors who sow in the eternal waters of love.

Posted in 91: MONSTER | Tagged

Yes

Posted on May 1, 2019 by Em König
Yes and I told Him that our blood is not unclean yes and they thought of us only as cocks in arses and other holes yes glorious yes and I wore dresses as far back as the fence yes every day yes those boots that came to my inner thigh yes they made a tapping sound yes on my inner thigh yes on the kitchen floor yes on the empty pool yes it is hard to say yes whether I am one or the other yes these images will never be hung yes on walls in fancy frames yes and the dust has settled now yes across a thousand sweat-drenched nightclubs yes and there is so much glitter in everyone’s shit yes we are not simply light entertainment yes we are not daytime tv yes we are not Ave Maria yes we are not white cake and gifts yes we are not a disclaimer on an empty packet yes your grinning makes us sour yes we will no longer wear the veil yes we will never touch your children yes we are not always in ecstasy yes we are not the blood of birds yes we are not a candelabra yes we are not drippings of hot wax yes we are not a muted scale yes and there were many stains on his sheets yes and it turned itself into an artwork yes a war of art yes and the whole community came together yes with raised flags and high voices yes and we were never never a swollen trope yes we will not make the finale yes we are not the woman or the man yes we are still never holding hands in the street yes and perhaps we were not Born This Way yes we were made this way yes scarred by words yes and being told yes no yes we will continue to win yes and we are not all dying yes but we all are yes.
Posted in 91: MONSTER | Tagged

All The Things I Kept

Posted on May 1, 2019 by Nike Sulway

1.
Grief is the feeling you have
the process you pass through
like a tunnel but more
physiological / a response to losing
some thing / some one
you once loved.

So when they call to tell me you are dying
to describe the room in which they have laid you down
to tell me that my mother is there by your side
and my sister is on her way and all the four horsemen
of your personal apocalypse have gathered
at the window to wait and watch you as you go /
when they tell me that your breath is slowing / that your
heart – that stubborn muscle –
beats irregularly now, is falling still, is stopping
now stopping
now stopped

Grief is not what I feel

2.
Three days later I wake
far from home in a dark town

We have lost two fathers now
Mine and yours in quick succession and
Although I have nothing to say
I get up and lay out words on paper
because I need them, because
they are the only things that make sense in this
insensible world.
I need them to hold me here
on this side of whatever wall there is between us and our dead
I write down my second father’s name
and the name of my first father
and my own name
and your name
I write down the first words I knew and then the last
each on a new sheet of paper / but there is
something wrong
each time I lift the pen the words are gone

I do not know the names of things
there are no words for this

I am
far from home in a dark town and the words – all words
all language – are draining from me like the blood
they drained from you after you died.

We are empty now
We are hollow

Soon, we might truly become
what we first were.

3.
He keeps coming back
old ticker, old fucker
his hands reach around my throat and
squeeze
I can feel the heat of his
burned skin
the stink of his breath
the grip he has on me

but then he is fading he is turning
to smoke or, no, it is more like the air
of the dark separates him from himself
As if the death outside of him
has collided with the death inside him

soon, they will meet on the surface of his
disrupted skin

I am alive, he says.
No, I tell him. you are dead.

We spend weeks, months, in this dance

We go around in circles.
It is as if I am
roadkill and he is waiting. He waits
the way a vulture waits
by the side of the road
waiting for a break in the traffic
to strike

4.
We don’t bury our fathers / any more
We don’t lay their bodies in the earth.

There are no memorials for the dead white men
who loved us / who hurt us
whose fists broke and then mended
our hearts / our bones.

We burn them like Vikings …
not really. There are no warships / flaming on open seas.

Only women in suits
who sit us down in air-conditioned rooms
serving tea and sandwiches
while your bodies are cleaned and plasticised
prepared for viewing

Days later, your body is delivered
into a furnace that burns without flames
And your ashes are vacuumed up
by a certified technician who seals you
into a baby-blue plastic box
in a white cardboard box

you are heavy, now,
your death has a material weight
you sit in the corner of the room

one more thing
to move around

5.
My family cannot agree on where to spread your ashes
and so you are divided
one last time
my mother’s portion
is weighed in the kitchen scales

A kilogram of your ashes for her
and another for each
of your children

It is a kind of joke / this last quibbling
over where to throw the soft grey
flakes – the divided portions that remain

I hear a rumour that my mother
poured a cup of you into the toilet
and shat on you one last time

I can’t take any of this seriously without getting
everything wrong

But how else are we to take ourselves, our lives,
given the seriousness of our plight?

6.
I wake in the night / choking again on
your hands drifting down the channel of my throat

I hear you laughing in the next room
telling stories in the last person.
I hear you telling the moon
that a story is not what’s necessary / not what’s needed
there is no way to make any sense of things, no need
for a story

only a life

7.
I wish we could message the dead
I would write to tell you all the things
I kept from you

I would make you listen
to my heart keening like a curlew

I would make you feel the tendons / crack

I would make you feel the throb of that mended
break in my arm and the dimple in my
skull from where you
slammed my head against the wall

I would make you vomit up my other, first, father
give him back to me, goddamnit
give him back

he was not yours to eat / to love
to lose

8.
September. The season turns and you
are still not here

I take it back, old man
I take it all back
I take it hard, I take it harder than I can explain
We are here, far from home
in a dark town

there are no words

there is no grieving for the ones
we never loved
the ones who never loved us in return

Posted in 91: MONSTER | Tagged

Review Short: Iris Fan Xing’s South of Words

Posted on April 26, 2019 by Alex Creece

South of Words by Iris Fan Xing
Flying Island Books, 2018

Christopher (Kit) Kelen has described Iris Fan Xing’s South of Words as ‘not translation’. The intersection between English and Chinese Mandarin lies at its heart, reflecting Fan’s converging identities across settings and cultures. Her publisher, Kelen identifies that readers’ engagement with bilingual poetry can be limited by our evaluation of translated works predominantly by their faithfulness to the assumed ‘original’ product, often regarding translation itself as necessarily an act of ‘watering down’. Fan has previously subverted this notion in her debut collection, Lost in the Afternoon (2009), which was intended instead as a conversation between parallel texts, capable of greater richness and imaginative value in tandem than as a standalone works.

South of Words operates in a similar manner; as a non-Chinese speaker, I am acutely aware that my reading of the collection is incomplete. Nonetheless, it is this prospect of her multilingual poetry that allows Fan to represent cross-cultural identity on its own, authentic terms, while offering a uniquely nuanced experience to readers, particularly those belonging to the author’s diasporic communities. In the same way, South of Words does not convey Fan’s relationship to Australian and Chinese cultures as discrete influences, but rather in their cultural synthesis.

The most overt representation of this occurs in the titular poem, which lies at the centre of the collection as a division between the English and Chinese sections. In ‘south of words’, the languages weave in and out, with English words in black text and Mandarin in white, together on a hazy, grayscale photograph. As the poem progresses, its background fades closer to black until the English words are almost fully obscured and the Chinese characters are starkly clear. This transitive quality serves to exemplify the collection’s emphasis on journeys, tenuously mapped out with direct and indirect references alike: 

the music will never be lost 又比如在黃昏的鄉間路上
透過飛馳的車窗 if you know how to listen
sit under a jacaranda 瞥見一匹桉樹下的馬
豐滿垂墜的腹部 when it’s blooming
let it play out loud 懷著一輪橘紅的太陽

The dialogic relationship between English and Mandarin is echoed with Fan’s thoughtful paralleling of physical locations – not by means of seamless, perfect comparisons, but through the sincerity and occasional disjointedness of personal perspective. This can be seen in ‘smog’, where Perth and Macao share common ground within their respective opposites:

don’t know why but parting
always reminds me of drifting clouds
maybe because I know that Xü Zhimo poem
embarrassingly well and you’ll agree with me
a seaside town like Macao presents
the best kind of summer cloud
generous in volume and almost tangible
the same kind in Perth in winter

Similarly, ‘after Hayashi Fumiko’ elicits an unsettled emotive response by drawing connections through—and in spite of—elements of disconnect:

living in a country
on the condition of a visa
is a visa is a visa

[…]

and our cat
lost one of her nine lives
to a passing car
but we know in Chinese
eight is the lucky number

In this sense, the bleeding of cultures into one other allows Fan to subvert the notion of a perfect metaphor in favour of a perfectly subjective metaphor. Memories are conveyed in their esoteric honesty – closer to the odd, internal logic of a child trying to rationalise the world, than the platitudes of an adult attempting to neaten it. Fan’s metaphors feel uniquely authentic in their refusal to be overwrought—or sanitised in a social vacuum—for the sake of universal relatability. The result, however, is relatable in its affective significance as a reader. Speaking a truth that is equally personalised by direct confession and subtle contextualisation of Eastern and Western influences, contemporary and mythological figures, and multilingualism, Fan produces work that is layered with interpretative nuances, but can still be appreciated at different levels of depth. This allows for a diversity in readership of Chinese and non-Chinese speakers alike, and both casual and academic readers of poetry, without alienating those who lack specific contextual knowledge and may simply enjoy the thoughtful intrigue of Fan’s language choices.

South of Words demonstrates the subjective merit of its intertexts in their capacity to enrich traditional modes of evocation. The relationship between experiential and referential elements allows for an undiluted representation of the self that is not confined to the East or West either in physical location, nor language, nor self-identity. This is also depicted frankly in ‘love it or…’:

love it or write it in your language
ignore grammar – tense and gendered nouns
mine for the sound of storm in clouds
for the image of a peninsula and its reflection
on the sea where evening tides
race like ten million octopuses

love it or reverse the mirror
a waratah is still a waratah
a frangipani a frangipani
but a word is not the same word
love it or live it

Not only does this poem portray an uninhibited self, but it intertwines the entities of place and person. ‘love it or…’ also emphasises the metapoetic urge to create one’s own rules and write in a manner of authenticity that is self-defined in expression. In ‘Canton holiday’, the wider implications of valuing subjectivity are also conveyed as a protest against detached, officialised views of history:

she said
when representing history
you need to defamiliarise

does she mean we should see
through the eyes of that stray cat?

The poignant simplicity of these words is undercut by the power of their suggestion, simultaneous calling on the reader’s internal and societal awareness. South of Words ultimately feels like an exploratory journey of re-familiarising, where the self is as elusive and evolving as its physical settings, and histories are personalised within experience itself. In Fan’s poetics, while nothing is immune to change, nothing is quite devoid of familiarity either.

Posted in BOOK REVIEWS | Tagged ,

Aidan Coleman Reviews New and Selected Poems of Anna Wickham

Posted on April 8, 2019 by Aidan Coleman

New and Selected Poems of Anna Wickham edited by Nathanael O’Reilly
UWA Publishing, 2017

Devotees of Australian literature are unlikely to possess more than a half-dozen single volumes by poets born before Federation, and their reading of such poets is generally limited to anthologies. The problem, I’d suggest, is one of availability more than desire. University of Western Australia Publishing (UWAP) is one publisher looking to redress this through an intermittent series of titles, which include Lesbia Harford’s Collected Poems (2014) and the Collected Verse of John Shaw Neilson (2012), together with more recent classics, such as Francis Webb’s Collected Poems (2011) and the Selected Poems of Dorothy Hewitt (2010). UWAP’s latest volume is the elegantly produced New and Selected Poems of Anna Wickham, edited and introduced by Australian-born, poet-scholar Nathanael O’Reilly, which republishes 100 poems from Wickham’s five collections together with another 150 previously uncollected poems.

The book’s short introduction provides a brief outline of Wickham’s biography. She was born Edith Alice Mary Harper in London in 1883, but lived in Australia for most of her childhood in Maryborough (Queensland), Brisbane and Sydney – taking her pseudonym from a Brisbane street. Wickham returned to London in 1904 to pursue a singing career and there she married a successful solicitor, Patrick Hepburn, who remained her husband for over 20 years. The marriage, which produced four sons, was unhappy, largely because Hepburn opposed Wickham’s artistic pursuits – in 1913 he had his wife institutionalised for three months. George Bernard Shaw, Dylan Thomas, Katherine Mansfield, Laurence Durrell and DH Lawrence were among her circle of friends. Having struggled with depression for most of adult life, Wickham suicided at the age of sixty-three, leaving over a thousand poems, most of which remain unpublished.

Among the work collected by O’Reilly are free verse and strict forms, monologues, sonnets and verse in ballad-metre, short chiselled lyrics of regular rhyme and metre, imaginative narratives and dramatic monologues, and some mixing of distinctly different forms. A reader is often struck by a deliberate asperity. Wickham asks in ‘The Egoist’:

Shall I write pretty poetry – 
Controlled by ordered sense in me – 
With an old choice of figure and of word, 
So call my soul a nesting bird?

The answer is a resounding no. Living in the age of aeroplanes, she reasons – in the line that resolves the poem and stretches to a comic twenty-one syllables – that she will write her ‘rhythms free’. The homely Georgian imagery of the opening stanza is not entirely rejected but the work is generally more direct than that of most of Wickham’s contemporaries – ‘Paradox’, for example, opens with the phrase: ‘My brain burns with hate of you’ – but it can occasionally be esoteric and obscure. It is an erudite poetry in a literary sense, steeped in the classical tradition, in Shakespeare and the Romantics. The content is often more radical than the forms, as she explores and interrogates gender roles, marriage and motherhood. Perhaps most modern of all, she celebrates the therapeutic power of poetry.

The strength of Wickham’s personality, and the power of the work is manifest in ‘Mare Bred from Pegasus’:

For God’s sake, stand off from me: 
There’s a brood mare here going to kick like hell 
With a mad up-rising energy; 
And where the wreck will end who’ll tell? 
She’ll splinter the stable door and eat a groom. 
For God’s sake, give me room; 
Give my will room.

The poem’s force comes not only from the equine imagery that Wickham often returns to but from a diction that is both rhetorical and colloquial. It is a charged language of strong verbs, spiked consonants and quick vowel sounds. The compound-adjective, ‘up-rising’, is particularly powerful, while the eating of the stable boy, or figuratively the husband, manages both to menace and charm. The repeated plea for ‘room’ is central to another of the book’s strongest poems, ‘Divorce’: 

A voice from the dark is calling me.
In the close house I nurse a fire.  
Out of the dark cold winds rush free
To the rock heights of my desire.
I smother in the house in the valley below,
Let me out to the night, let me go, let me go.

Night is presented here, and elsewhere, as synonymous with the feminine and the creative. While the concerns of this poem are personal the imagery is, characteristically, elemental. We see the subtleties that Wickham is capable of in the adjectives ‘close’ and ‘rock’ and the verb ‘nurse’, the interesting use that ‘smother’ is put to, and the beautifully measured refrain. In other poems, Wickham prefers the role of the passionate lover to the dutiful wife, as in the ambiguous three-line ‘Function’:

I do not grudge you to your wife:
but take a mistress
And I'll have her life.

While the poet-speaker is resigned to dissatisfaction with marriage and concedes acquiescence to be the easier path, she refuses to be silent. The shrew is a trope to which Wickham often returns and, as the poet delighted in flouting social conventions in her lifetime, so the poet-speaker embraces this role with gusto.
In the poem, ‘Meditation at Kew’, which may remind of Thomas More’s Utopia, Wickham reimagines marriage. Written in rhyming couplets but set out in quatrains, it begins: 

Alas! for all the pretty women who marry dull men, 
Go into the suburbs and never come out again …

Wickham goes on to lament the sufferings of such suburban women and, in contrast, presents a sort of Arcadia: 

I would enclose a common in the sun,
And let the young wives out to laugh and run; 
I would steal their dull clothes and go away, 
And leave the pretty naked things to play.

The dullness of the clothes the speaker steals picks up on the poem’s earlier uses of the word, which include the ‘old dull’ gentle classes, who ‘must breed true’. The sun contrasts the sterile drabness of the earlier imagery, as the looser spirit of play contrasts the passivity and stasis implied by the poem’s opening. In Wickham’s ideal the women are to see all the men of the world before they make their choice of partner, and the resolution that follows fuses Wickham’s critique of patriarchy and the class system:

From the gay unions of choice 
We’d have a race of splendid beauty and of thrilling voice. 
The world whips frank, gay love with rods, 
But frankly gaily shall we get the gods.

Though the wife-husband context suggests the primary meaning of ‘gay’ to be something like joyous or carefree, the term’s modern usage was becoming more common in Wickham’s lifetime, and this secondary meaning reinforces a subtext of lesbian desire.

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Posted in BOOK REVIEWS | Tagged , ,

Ivy Ireland Reviews Ali Whitelock’s and my heart crumples like a coke can

Posted on April 8, 2019 by Ivy Ireland

and my heart crumples like a coke can by Ali Whitelock
Wakefield Press, 2018

Despite the sorrow of its title, and my heart crumples like a coke can will have an utterly expansive effect on the reader’s beat-box. My little heart almost burst as I read through this collection for the first time. And then the second. Like some classic 90s rom-com – or was it drama? – that you watched and then re-watched every weekend on VCR as a teen, Ali Whitelock’s book seems to encourage a closeness, invites the reader to experience a genuine connection with the poet/protagonist and with their bevvy of sidekicks, both the heroes and the villains. I find myself genuinely touched by the liquid, visceral rawness, the careful simplicity and confessional glory of Whitelock’s poems.

Perhaps it has something to do with the seemingly breezy style; I picture Whitelock scribbling these poems in five minutes – maybe ten – on the underside of napkins in a crowded café somewhere on Glebe Point Road, the Bukowskian edginess of it all just floating off her fingers to bless everything it touches like butter grease. This, I thought as I read, is precisely the poetry I would like to write. This, I thought, is the poetry I should be writing. Why am I not writing this bloody poetry? I thought, these odes to the horrid heat and shopping centre scourge of of the suburbs, the aging body, vaginas, chicko rolls and the farts of the dying? I am awestruck when confronted with such passages as this one, from ‘what you must you do/ you must keep your mouth shut’:

if you want you can tape it shut
with the snoring tape – he keeps it on the side of his bed.
Sometimes
it rolls off onto the carpet
the cat hair sticks to it because
what you must understand
is how you feel is not how others
feel. The important
thing you must do is not say how you feel
if you say how you feel he will roll his eyes and sometimes
after the eye rolling
there will be a sigh and what that means is you must not say
that thing again. Eventually
you will get to know the things that make the eyes roll and
the chest sigh and you will stop saying
them. If you hold a hermit crab shell to your ear
you can hear a rushing
and this rushing is the sound
of everything and the sound of nothing

This excerpt – and I would have included the whole poem if there was room for it – reveals Whitelock’s singular flair. The emotive content is moving without falling into sentiment, the motif and metaphor clever without leaning towards the pretentious. Even the centred structure works to jolt the reader into the importance of the particulars. This familiarity – imperative yet as casual as a conversation with a bestie – is I believe, is the kind of tone we all aim for, while endlessly editing and re-editing that seemingly unavoidable bullshit out. Her no-holds-barred, uncensored honesty when it comes to the small things – snoring tape, choice of lipstick when you turn fifty, brand of cooking chocolate – and the terrifyingly large things – death, exile (both voluntary and forced), aging, the mid-life affair, the aftermath of the affair – is so powerful it is contagious. Here are a few lines from ‘your friend said it was a love poem’:

             the therapist had seen it all before – a thousand
times apparently – in women my age with no children
go on then rub it in at least i’d had the presence 
of mind to ask about diseases you said
you had none backed it up with a printout
of your latest blood results you kept in a folder
marked ‘bloods’ which I didn’t find strange.

This blunt conversational tone is echoed, with perhaps even more harrowing honesty, in this excerpt, from the stand-out poem, ‘water’s for fish’:

as cliché as it sounds i always
imagined i’d get the call in the middle
of the night the one that would announce
that you were dead or at the very least 
be dying i’d be bleary eyed would thank 
the caller and hang up grateful
that i am safe my seventeen thousand 
kilometres away and geographically exempt
from delivering your eulogy from shaking
hands with those i have no wish to shake
hands with

These excerpts also highlight the less cohesive aspects of the collection, which are the slightly discombobulating lineation choices, and collisions of atypical sentence structures. Quite often, the poems appear as performance texts adjusted for the page; sometimes fully punctuated and precise, and sometimes – part emphasis, part rebellion, I’d imagine – utterly not. While Whitelock’s lineation most often works to build emphasis, at other times it can start to feel a little heavy-handed, especially when the powerful and poignant word choice is more than capable of speaking for itself and perhaps needs no further emphasis. That said, anyone who has read the Beats, perhaps especially Bukowski (who is clearly, wonderfully, a strong influence on the collection), will have little or no problem navigating the momentary bumps caused by unpunctuated sentence collisions. Certainly, when listening to these poems read aloud (in a smoking hot Scottish accent; Whitelock is an impressive reader), any thought about formatting fades away.

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Posted in BOOK REVIEWS | Tagged ,

Editorial to AFRO AUSTRALIAN

Posted on April 1, 2019 by Saaro Umar

In an interview with Dami Àjàyí, Kwame Dawes speaks on his large and generous offerings – the work that he has contributed towards and within a greater African Diasporic poetics. Àjàyí asks after what drives him towards curation, when the work requires so much time, and when tending towards one’s own creative impulse can seem like enough.

I can’t think I am living large if the home we live in is a mess while my own room is spotless. I want a beautiful mansion for all of us. Yes, I realise this is not a seamless nor an especially artful allegory.

The allegory leads towards something of legacy, of archives, and threads into so many conversations I’ve had with African creatives.

How do we have self-determination? What would it look like to build structures that cradle and spiral?

Sometimes a seemingly befitting answer falls into our hands, manifesting into collectives and readings, spaces For Us By Us, and other times the conversations flow between us, and is left within the atmosphere, until we decide we are ready to breathe that same air back into the lungs.

When the idea was posed to me to collate this issue, I’ll admit, concerns arose within me. I questioned the usefulness of such an endeavor due to the complexity of the term ‘African’, the complexity of Australia, and assumptions underpinning being under such an umbrella, as writers. This questioning emerged as a sort of anger towards the structural hierarchies that are so insidious – that can live and fester within the most well-intentioned projects. My anger took me back to reading Nikki Giovanni’s Nikki Rosa, a touchstone poem for me that I always return to when feeling unsure about the why of poetry. 

and I really hope no white person ever has cause 
to write about me
because they never understand
Black love is Black wealth and they’ll
probably talk about my hard childhood
and never understand that 
all the while I was quite happy

I love the precariousness of this happy, the little secrets it holds, what it might mean amongst Black people, what happy feels, tastes likes, what it knows for us. These secrets, these threads, if nothing more, binds us across communities – not as cohesive, but as something that can only be felt within a smile, or nod when passing someone else from within.

I write this to say, there are secrets within the poems of this collection that are reserved for the artist(s). Perhaps this is the case for every work of art ever made, perhaps I am writing this as an affirmation, rather than of evidence. Exposure is not always fortunate, and the border, liminality, holds within it its own gifts.

I write this to enquire, what binds us, what is our lineage, and how did we find ourselves here?

I’m thinking to a conversation that I shared with Idil Ali, Somali poet and artist working in Narmm, that was a timely reminder on community. A reminder of how small and delicate, or how large and gregarious our communities can be, and to keep these connections close.

It is perhaps a sort of waking dream – this seeing of each other, of engaging eye-to-eye. A dream where, each of us knows what can be given, and what can be received. Where boundaries are holy, and belonging is fundamental – where the point of this belonging does not have to be proven. It reminds me that at times, it is confusion, or being scared, angry, or embodied and imagining other ways through, that is the place from where stories find their beginning. I loop back and dream towards what my happy childhood was and was not, and to Nikki Rosa, to poise the moments of disparity that Diaspora can bring.

When the brain screams: you are alone, which really means, you have forgotten your ancestors, search for a way home.

Knowing that others have paved a path makes the experience a little sweeter. Maxine Beneba Clarke has been a great light across the landscape. Afeif Ismail, who appears in this collection, has been a working poet and playwright for decades, and Sista Zai Zanda, who also appears here, is someone who has become an elder to many, starting and shaping, paving paths for many young poets and writers through the art and power held in making space. And there are many elders who may not be known by the establishment, or, those respected as practitioners in their home country, and have changed the nature of their practice. Or, like most of my aunties and uncles, sing their song at weddings, at funerals, over khat or in private. We can dream wider than we ever have, knowing what came before us.

I’m excited to share this collection of poems from some of my friends from the Diaspora. The poems in this collection are tender – they are works that hold ancestry, rigor, and are driven by deep waters.

These poems speak of food, power, and beauty and, care as they do, violence and anarchy. The beauty in each of these works is their gut, skill and self-examination of circumstance.

I want to say, I hope this is the beginning of something, but I feel that would be undervaluing, so I will just say thank you to poets who shared their work, thank you to each poet who has inspired their work, and for all to read in peace.

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Posted in ESSAYS | Tagged

4 Works by Guled Abdulwasi

Posted on April 1, 2019 by Guled Abdulwasi

‘Form Work’ explores architectural forms, lines and shapes that are depicted in architectural drafting. The combination of abstracted overlapping lines conveys the busy, overwhelming Melbournians’ lives and experience. The visual representation seeks to communicate these overwhelming but symmetrically constructed tasks we must overcome day to day.

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Posted in ARTWORKS | Tagged

ሲድት

Posted on April 1, 2019 by Manal Younus

we gather in basements 
community halls and cafes 
reviving a place
found deep in our wounds
sip sickly sweet coffee 
play the beat of our hearts 
through broken speakers 
we ride electric keyboards through time 
inhale poetry from yesterday 
bleed love onto the dance floor 
shake the pain from our shoulders 
   we have come so far 
   yet we have not moved

Posted in 90: AFRICAN DIASPORA | Tagged

The Platonic Split

Posted on April 1, 2019 by Lemis Yousif

The process was a languid pain, assigned from a hollowed spectre of what ought to be

Recall Beauviour’s subject and the other as whole – the knowing of the other’s presence, while not present, is the telling. Love binds us to this persistence and moulds us accordingly.

Love as assemblage, machinic and perpetual psychic production,
becoming a body in all its physiological functions (Deleuze, Guattari)

What, then?

This pursuit bygone, for there was never a whole to gain
But the severance is just as pained
The wound revealed

It begins with wakeful panic,
persists with yearning,
ends in flight

This is always the path of least resistance, a diminishing return. It still eludes me whether I heal or ache.

Worry for me, I wanted to tell you.
Sporadically, spontaneously.
Could your heart ache like mine?
Agonising synchrony.

I tend to exaggerate, to dramatise the ordinary. What’s more ordinary than cerebral waves? Reality talks behind my back and laughs at my expense, my mortal fear. Darling, you’re being silly.

Another time swings through me in orbs and that’s where my ease rests. Years for now we’re lost in the mountains and I remembered you. Your name stills me, and I pause my tread. The journey is deafening. I rehearse and heed myself at its zenith, imagining the rehearsal will conceive the impossible.

Longing in distance is relative, both in physical and affective distance. For in every inch they allow, you will long for a quotient unreached.
This is the wound: you were never here as we were never whole.

Posted in 90: AFRICAN DIASPORA | Tagged

you have no idea how far i swam

Posted on April 1, 2019 by Atong Atem

I’ve got a long stare, a powdery touch
And enough buckles around my chest
To keep it all in
I’ve got a twitch in my right eye,
A dry cough and something crawling
Under my skin that I can’t name

Yesterday the sky looked green to me
My elbows itched as the rain clouds
Rolled over;
A stampede, then nothing for a long time

Yesterday my phone rang twice
And it sounded like sirens from a cloudy dream
This morning my phone rang once
And it sounded like my mother’s voice
Calling me to dinner

I’ve got sweaty palms and a crooked step
Last week I fell from the mulberry tree
behind my mother’s house
Last night I woke from sleep,
Saw an angry finger digging into my stomach
And felt five years old again

I once threw myself at a passing train
But remembered I could float
Before my body touched hot steel
Behind my eyelids I saw the shape of
My body, crumble
Like burnt toast
And I watched pieces of myself gather in groups
Like gulls flying home

Last month I thought I was a wooden gate
Left to dry and turn gray
And I held myself like that for a long time
Solid and heavy
Solid and heavy

I’ve got limbs that I’ve named;
Claim a thing to own it
I’ve got limbs that I’ve lost and
I’ve named them all “Yesterday”
Last night my mother called my name
And her name rang out
I’m young, I said, and I’m tired today

I’ve got a pain in the centre
Of my spine and it sounds like a screeching bus
When i run
It’s the sound of placing your hurts in
Alphabetical order,
Tieing them with beautiful bows
And expecting the healing to begin

Sometimes it sounds like the mazes
Built wider and more complex
To make the centre of it all
Impossible to get to

Sometimes it sounds like
Protecting your traumas
Because they’re the longest,
Most loyal relationship you’ve ever had.

I’ve got dry eyes and a heavy gut
And they carry me home and
Carry me home.

Posted in 90: AFRICAN DIASPORA | Tagged

To the still

Posted on April 1, 2019 by Wani Lefrere

Ode to the little child who was told not to fight
because their silence made them beautiful.

Because their beautiful made them too ugly to ever be raped.

Because she was so pretty they should be
thankful to have ever been so lucky.

Ode to the little girl who was told not to
fight because her silence made her beautiful.

Because being 5 and alive is cause enough for
annihilation and retribution isn’t for you,

so you must to die to yourself daily.

Ode to the 8 year old girl who was cut up so
beautifully that her gravestone outsized her casket.

To the little black children whose God got robbed
because their ugly had it coming.

You.

Are still beautiful.

Ode to the little black boy in me who was made
beautiful by adults two decades my age because my beauty had it coming.

Because silence has made a home here and
little black children aren’t even worth the price of their own bodies.

Ode to those bodies.

Ode to those bodies being temples worthy only of God.

Ode to those lonely nights of persistence where
quiet revolutions don’t happen till 3 A.M. when no one else is watching.

When no one else is close.

When you’ve bathed yourself warm in tears till prayer won’t roll off your tongue and no matter how hard you scrub, you still can’t wipe that stain covered memory of last nights sin. Ode to the sin. And all those moments when your body no longer feels like yours. When you’ve bared yourself bone dry from trying to wash away their touch. Ode to the touch. And silent mornings where waking up feels more like a funeral than a rising.

Ode to the rising.

Ode to being alive. And surviving. Still.

Ode the still.

Posted in 90: AFRICAN DIASPORA | Tagged

Garden of Grace

Posted on April 1, 2019 by Kyah Parrott

I never pictured you as the type
to appreciate the simple things in life.

To get lost for hours in a garden of flowers,
and snap pictures of fistfuls of lavender pixels.

I always knew you were
addicted to power.

Always knew you were attracted to men who
could fulfil fantasies of damsel in distress,

and could rescue you from towers.
Slay your dragons and demons,

wake you from your sleep, and do it with a kiss.
Where bed sheets only grew knots from tangled

limbs. But now, sis,
you knot bed sheets to let them in.


Posted in 90: AFRICAN DIASPORA | Tagged

Bloody QnA

Posted on April 1, 2019 by Sista Zai Zanda

Mandy makes a bold beeline to the Centre of Power,

Where the microphone amplifies her like a riot.

As soon as she feels any discomfort stirring up,
Man, she storms.

Forward to the mic!

She moves in defence of her right to defend her right to eternal inner peace and quiet.

From her reserved seat, front row and centre, Mandy power strides her way to the mic.

Arms swinging wide and
Heavy like pendulums.
She arrives. She huffs. She puffs. Straight into the mic.
Then, after releasing a slow wheeze, sound crescendos into a high pitch whine – like a siren.

We clock entitlement as she assumes right to command and oversee ‘Operation Restore Order.’

We observe privilege.

She: Patriarchy’s smug self-appointed, self-congratulatory Microphone Mandy.

She: Patriarchy’s smug his/storical record- and time-keeper.
The coveted “A”position of proximity to power won in exchange for access to entitlements and protection:
Rights to take up all remaining space; and an army of armoured Knights to defend her patch against
encroachment and squatters.

No one can step in her way – bossy strut forward.
No one dares.
We just stare. We are already exhausted by the thought the mere anticipation of yet another episode of
“Microphone Mandy Micromanages the Matrix”.

She reaches. First to speak. She takes the mic like an Olympic athlete accepting a hard-won gold prize.
She grins. Excited. Entitled. Oblivious.
And proceeds to neatly pack up everything we had just exploded out of the box.
Pleased, she ties a ribbon around it. Secures the lid shut. Then begins to hurl.

We wonder how she came up with a question so quickly.
Looks like she never listened.
Sounds like she arrived with a little something she prepared earlier.
Something she knew was good for us – without consulting us.

Looks like it.

Look, see how she lunges forward and snatches up the microphone without so much as a glance around to see
if the people who are the subject of discussion actually have something to say, first.

We notice the oversight. We side-eye.

She, oblivious, to all but her painful need to remain front and centre hurls up a cacophonous accusation.
Hurls up all over the speaker’s floor: Microphone Mandy Micromanages The Matrix.

She spews a riot of barely digested chunks all over the floor.
We stare at the mess. She finishes. Turns to us. Demands we clean it up. We stare into space.

She hurls up, again. Tone beneath it all is a riotous blood red, cleverly dressed up as Righteous (But Carefully
Controlled Civilised) Rage. We notice.

We vomit in our mouths.
Yet, still. We feign ignorance, there. We sit dignified, here. We drift off, over there. Everywhere our eyes glaze
over. Imagination takes over.

We enter another dimension and co-exist in a world beyond this mess and as she hurls,
we dance in liberation’s fields.

As she issues a statement in the tone of Innocence-Under-Siege,
We – hoping it is safe to return – cautiously drift back.
Unfortunately, we just catch the tail end of her long-winded, purported observation-cum-question which sucks
up all the oxygen in the room.

That little snippet is enough
To. Make. Us. Snap. Back.

We gasp. and. suddenly.
choke on toxic air.

She – Lucky Microphone Mandy – remains oblivious or perhaps justified in her purported defence of Innocence-
Under-Siege.

Within two milliseconds, this sneaky saboteur loaded a canister of nerve gas into her throat and fired it out over
the PA. Reverb and echo over the unsuspecting daydreaming crowd the poison lands.
Releases toxic gas.
We are sucked back into her game. Her rules. Her time. Ticking according to the entitled swing of those
pendulous arms.

Forced to merge back into this reality, we re-emerge with a splutter.
It stinks of undigested chunky spew. We sink. We cover our mouths. We vomit some more – in our mouths.
We in shock. Sniper attack deflates our optimism – our flailing life buoy.

Suddenly, we find ourselves at sea drowning while gasping in her poison air. We can’t breathe.

Our shoulders curl in to protect hearts caving in under the blind belligerent onslaught.
Her assertion of privilege. Her demand to remain at the centre. Her refusal to budge – not even a nudge.

She, like a dash of blood riotous red dressed up as righteous rage, rampages, unchecked –
Of course.

Us?
We lose to live another day. We choose to win the war. We steer clear of this spat. We hunch over.
We curl in to protect ourselves from the shrapnel as she explodes in an assured act of civility a.k.a. violence
with impunity. And so ends the promise of unity. So dies the hope of community living beyond the perpetual
reassertion of this self-serving supremacy.

Where
and
When
in all this madness will Microphone Mandy finally learn to find her humanity?
This. is. insanity.

Posted in 90: AFRICAN DIASPORA | Tagged

The Physics of Self

Posted on April 1, 2019 by Rafeif Ismail

Quantum entanglement posits
That two or more objects may
Exist in reference to one another,
Regardless of space & time.

my doctor calls it complex post-traumatic stress disorder
says disassociation instead of liberation
says flashback instead of memory
says then instead of now, here, always

Every me is tired.

/

“I don’t want to do this Khalto”
“Can you believe this girl?
you are here,
Surrounded by Possibilities.

And baby girl
a Possibility isn’t something you, having had, throw away.
It’s a fruit, bite in, swallow the flesh and the rind, the complete bittersweet experience.
Why do you wear your sorrow like a chain?
dragging
always stopping just before the finish line…”

/


that wave function duality
Schrödinger’s health,
unseen, unacknowledged.
Ubiquitous repression of worldly cruelties
You turn to a friend and say:

fam, I’ve got a joke for you
yeah?
when do you know a black woman is struggling?
She Laughs
at her funeral of course

There are eulogies encoded into your DNA,
trauma has no time limit and recovery is a myth.

/

Wellness maybe choice
but access is a myth.
the punishment must fit the crime,
the audacity of demanding life.
After all,
human rights are a lie
applying to those we see human

Never Forget
health care systems are war zones too.

/

Once a psychologist told me that I was trapped in a cage of my own memories.
To leave the past in the past and focus on the here and now.
Some wars have no borders, they obey no time zones

Now, here, Always.
Every me is fighting.

Posted in 90: AFRICAN DIASPORA | Tagged

Life Poem

Posted on April 1, 2019 by Magan Magan

You are paralysed in the living room of your neighbour
begging the walls of the room to consume you.
Everything in this house smells like desperation.
The dust that gather under the window
disappear at night like scattered children
fading into the distance as they go home.

Sahal walks into the room slightly destroyed by the rain.
And you listen quietly to the strange way sorrow laughs
when his mother answers the home phone:
I died the night his father opened my body, thrusting his hammer back and fourth until
my insides were filled with his ruins.
She slams the phone on the ground and yells
We’ve all had thoughts of killing our children.

You shiver and Sahal says:
Let her be, she is human.

Posted in 90: AFRICAN DIASPORA | Tagged

go ahead, call it magic

Posted on April 1, 2019 by Soreti Kadir

Incantations alchemise all languages
with language powerful things can be done and undone.

How many times did the language lay you
bear enough to make another unafraid of themselves?

Even when you are lost for words
it is language that disappears?

I hear it all and I am not alarmed,
the little-feathered baby serenading the rushing tyers grip.

I see it all and I am not alarmed,
the devotion begging for a love that is only inside,

the carousel whirling around
the same story of misfortune.

This world is quiet in describing her beauty
she says, come and watch me do all the things that don’t make sense,

she says, I believe in you
even when you choose to tear at the hem of your humanity—

for the sake of my aliveness
I write elegantly always,

even if what I have to say is seemingly empty and dry
In preparation for the big feelings.

I write elegantly always
so when they arrive,

for these eternal etchings
soft bedding awaits,

and no struggle for
elegances dulls them.

Posted in 90: AFRICAN DIASPORA | Tagged

Chalk to Charcoal

Posted on April 1, 2019 by Bigoa Chuol

I wrote you in chalk, smeared my thoughts of you in charcoal
I am a blood orange, I have few edges and even fewer dreams
You,
You’re like lint, a broken thing, sketched in pencil
Even iron will soften with heat, but beloved I’ve lost my fire
The toll of life has extinguished my flame
I’m exhausted by these ceaseless mind games
The eloquence in my voice is in vain,
Hoping they would surface in your consciousness by they sank rapidly
Into an ocean of overwhelming indifference
My intricacies are priceless, never-the-less there are places in me the
Light does not know, places that hold no semblance of happiness
In the face of my ugly and sinister will you embrace me with
Compassion? In your eyes will I meet graciousness?

Your knees buckle with the overwhelming urge to flee,
There things only for so long can you suppress
Perhaps you’re perplexed by my deep affections for blackness
Suddenly you don’t recognise my Nile warriors’ prowess
Familiar stranger, I toil to look past your day dress just to see that
You’re marvel in vast emptiness
We both lack self-awareness but you’re quick to call what is mine
Wretchedness

Friend you were once an antidote for melancholy
But I feel the depths of your mind are still colonised
Now I realise
It’s childlike folly, the pendulum of superficial curiosity
Yesteryear I was a temple, so strangely words escape you
Now I am comparable to a tomb
Have you brand new eyes with which to gaze? Cause these eyes have
Failed to perceive the hue of your true intentions
Now I carry desolation in my womb

Your face was once an intense moonlight with a blue tint,
Serene
Now my magic you charge obscene corrosive, rust on iron, what’s it
Matter, this is nothing but a row between a ferocious antelope and a
Cowardice lion
Your world is aquatic but you know nothing of the melanin marine
I am right in front of you. I am air, I am light, I am water, yet I
Remain unseen
Your presence is pacifying in the realm where lust dances with
Desperation in hopes to keep loneliness at bay I am dumb-found that
We stand here and call it ‘vibing’
Have you ever seen a soul bereaved?
No wonder my body aches when you leave.
Now he pawns my treasures walks about with pieces of me in his
Pocket like loose change or old gum. My collar bone on his mouth, my
Smile dragging by his dirty boots in absence of sincerity I leave his
Lips bruised.
My worlds are flat and cold I struggle to whisper my tongues numb
I wear your disdain for me like a waist bead
Hiding from leery eyes I’ve read your character assassin’s creed

Ensnared in a misogynist culture
Your love bird is a scavenging vulture
Belly full but still grumbling, he comes to floss his teeth
with Femininity.
You’re infatuated with the idea of me, infatuated with the idea of
Free.
I’m drained not empty my silence is not in protest I’ve not an ounce of
Fight left.
You would be mad to think this body arts-less
Blasphemy!
Take several seats and bear witness to this Kemetic alchemy
I wrote you in
chalk,
Evanescent,
Smeared my thought of you in charcoal

I am blood orange, I have few edges and even fewer dreams

Posted in 90: AFRICAN DIASPORA | Tagged

Fall

Posted on April 1, 2019 by Fatma Hussein

Sky in. A type of kin that will make even
you beg for more. Whispers of favourites
turn the flame on. I let the words curve into
my mouth this way—what I’m trying to say
is still unfinished and coded it sounds a lot
like unspoken verbs, pronoun of this is the
heart. The adjective is the way the mind is
feeling but too scared of its truth. We have
never done things this way before.

Our words are backwards and on purpose,
how do we make sense of all this heat, what
happens when both passion and tension
sweeten the tongue, how do we tame
ourselves out of these flames so carefully
careless we could set everything on fire the
way we like this feeling to be this talented.
Watch the way it has taken over a body that
shares the words care and love with self.

When she lets you in be carefully honest
with everything, she is both blind and bright
in the same notion.

Posted in 90: AFRICAN DIASPORA | Tagged

Ghosts

Posted on April 1, 2019 by Piriye (Piri) Altraide

egusi soup trails
pepper soup stories
pounded yam, ingra fish
theories. parents chatter nigeria
in the background. your
favourite was the mango
salted avocado
fleshy yellow, green.
roasted peanuts
cracked from shells
charcoaled suya sticks
laden with chilli
akara balls and
sugary sweet puff-puff.
you wonder if you spoke
two languages
pidgin-english flowing
fluently from your lips
just as easily as the ‘real’ thing
did.
tongue sprinkled
with flavours of
lost language.
one day the driver couldn’t
get you to school
roads blocked
as fighting broke
out. a man runs past
gunshot wound.
you drew a picture of it in
class. compound kids
spitting on your
head as they saw you
and your sister
over the walls
in the oyibo
school. chasing
baby chickens in
the yard of the
compound that is how
you got that scar
on your heel cutting
your foot on the
corrugated iron. fireflies
decorating night walks
to visit uncles and friends
drinking beer.
‘here try this one,
it’s malt-flavoured.’ some
kids caught jars of
the insects. long days
of wandering
coming home
when dusk dawned
would life have been better,
if you stayed here?
knew what it felt like
to grow up with your people?

she was five,
but already knew what love
was not.

Posted in 90: AFRICAN DIASPORA | Tagged