Poetry

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We are not birds but

Febrile, dizzy and tipping against the porcelain edge of
some woman’s tub: here I am.
This not my home.
Kwaku, five dogs, a grandmother live here
and I am cough, wind, smell -passing. And thankful for it.

His voice lays like a reminder.
Against my mirror these eyes scan
places familiar with his touch, land always
on the lobe and sit waiting for noise. Call me. Say this:
I still smell you here, quiet, small, asleep.

Turning a corner I reached to embrace some man
with the same chin, same hard fists swinging near his knees.
Only the hot dust of this earth came full in my mouth and the poetry faded.
I climbed the tro tro instead, gave them my quarter, headed to a glass America
in the centre of town for batteries.

He is fed across this ocean
with song like chord that leaves me bound and yielding,
prostrate beneath headphones.
Hot with malaria, I wept lyrical.
And this town, this city, this wound came fragrant,
all blood and bowels and me masked with iodine
singing defeat, asking for removal, binging on television,
pleading for silence. My pupils dilated for need of dark.

But fevers bring strange dreams. Recovering, forcing bread
down my throat with juice for good measure, I forget I dreamed massacre.
I say, steady. Steady. This too shall pass. Each day another measure
of our parent’s blood drawn in us, of the impossibility of transfusion,
of flight and her strange mutation of distance.

We are not birds but
here I am, migrant in winter,
searching seed from the palm of strangers
and planning my return for spring.
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I swam here

I. (Ouagadougou)

He looks at me blankly, like I am wood turned woman.
He wants to know why I am here. Or he wants to know my order.
I simply nod. Je Mais Le. This is all I know. The words like brail on my tongue.
Maybe if I gesture he will bring me coffee.

Burkina Faso from beneath this awning is a woman who ignores her poverty.
Here, she is perched on her husband’s knee, well-behaved. We all shake hands and
eat richly. Smoke cigarettes and chew baguette. In this shade, with hot cups of Nescafe

it doesn’t matter what happens in the bedroom. These are just politics of display.

My waiter returns with flowery tea. A slice of lemon. An ashtray.
My hands are night grey from smoke, my chest thick with fluid.
If he could have listened, I would have said:

I swam here coughing, crying, pulling all waters from my body and bleeding the distance.

Each hour measured in ounces. On the constant apex of dehydration. Of stagnancy.
I swam here swallowing. Fearing what happens when there is nothing left to leak.

That is why I keep smoking. It is harder to remove the motion from my breath. And I need to keep going. I know I have not seen it all yet.

II. (Timbuktu)

The ocean calls needlessly. I am already on my way.

The desert is an black place. I drank the Niger and almost sank teeth into a camel’s back.
Night was a dry cold. We did not see stars. Only sblackepia then an absence of color. The desert is a place.

Even my lungs dried hollow. Maymeti wrapped me in indigo. Gave me salted gazelle. I lay prostrate in the sun until I burned magenta. We travelled slowly, remembering wind and shifting our bodies, always towards the sea.

III. (Nombori)

I came back, he said, because I didn’t know how to write about this place.

We were in a small opening between land and sky, rock and star.

I didn’t mention the fluid. That my only recourse was to float and that this movement
had no language.

I pressed my skin to rock and opened mouth to bulhadi, the north star, the only compass I could remember, hoping the silence might answer his question.

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Security Officer becomes a Turtle (Tabloid series II)

Kofi left the window open.
The night blew thin through the pane,
stirred pages from the desk and still

he was stoic, patient, still.
He could smell the rain coming.
It kept him fastened

to the silence, the potential of water,
the great weight the room could hold
if a flood began.

The blisters in his mouth tasted
of salt, fin, algae. For months he had been drinking
from the sea and eating what grew off the nets.

His teeth had sharpened, skin grown to leather.
The mornings spent wading in the Keys had sunk his body
to current, drawn the skin from his back and hardened

his shoulders, pelvis, spine.
Tonight the bone glowed white hot and sang
to be bathed in fresh water.

When the storm began, he did not hesitate to slide from his desk
to the basin of the office and swim through the torrents
of the on-pouring rain.