Excerpt from Binding a Divine Multiplicity into One, Sherese Francis

 

Prompt 1: The Hermit and The Hanged Man — Floating Within the Inner World

Connected. The Atlantic Ocean. Is a way of entering.

An edge is a point of breakthrough.

Another word for edge is egg.

Think of the ways you enter this space. 

All the ways the space and its memory enters you. 

Think of the ways you can be born anew by entering at the edge:

Space Odyssey

The outer world as you've known

Broken and dry desert

You walk 

Forged into a flame 

Ridden by a thirst for

Something else

This dark and foreign

Biting at the soul

And here you come across

This orb of time beyond

No past no future

Just is 

A cycling of energy

And in it sparks light

Shapes a new geography

Within you

Venture into space

Let the blood rush through

The body to the head

Into a bird's eye view

A leg slipping 

Beyond its limits

The lightheaded feel

The dream of seeing

The whole world

Swinging

Upside down

The way it truthfully

Enters your eyes

The stars in re/verse

Prompt 5: Nine of Cups — Find Contentment Within Oneself Despite Discomfort 

“You've got the cool water when the fever runs high” — Something So Right by Paul Simon

I.

The magic of interconnection aka the circle of life aka Newton's third law of motion.

The borrowing, the inflation and the changing of currents.

When an external force causes trauma on a body. Digs into it and wounds it. This causes manifestations on its surface. 

The body will respond. 

Changes the way it moves. The way it functions to try to protect itself. 

It is forced to grow in new ways.

How has your body responded to the trauma of another's violation? Digging into you? 

How did it change the way you moved? 

How your body functioned? 

How did you try to protect yourself? 

How did it grow you in new ways?

II.

 A long time to pretend. A long time to be somewhere you don't really want to be. To stand in a pew, closed-mouth, while the congregation sings glory hallelujah. Because you remember hearing the pastor say “don't sing it if you don't mean it.” But you clap and sway because you still like the music. Shake hands with members who believe you believe. Drop a dollar in the collection basket to pay for taking up space. Half-listen to the sermon to catch words to later turn into a poem or story. Sit when they ask for those to come to the altar to be saved. Eat the cracker and drink the wine at communion because it is just a metaphor for you and nothing more. Say Amen at the benediction knowing its root comes from the word for truth. Leave the church and question if you are going to come back just to please your mother who believes so much. Wish you could believe it too but know you found another way to be saved and must stay quiet about it for now. Still thankful to have oases for thirst. You still have the cool water to fill yourself. And still You are a cup runneth over to fill others.

Prompt 7: Five of Cups and Three of Pentacles — The Transformation of Divine En/Arky

I.

The Construction of Home Always Involves the Haunting of the Other.

In our desire for "material progress,” is the pond.

The pounding. The pondering. An enclosure and the flow within it.

Currents or currency. All are hauntings. Reminders of what's there and not there in the (X)change.

The road and the edge are filled with haunting. 

They carry with them the invisible flow of memory. 

The reasons why we care. Why we trouble ourselves. Why we travel on journeys like this.

Ponder this: can progress be the same as a pollution? As a burial for others?

What ghostly memories are you choosing to embrace? To extend yourself towards in these homes in which we live? 

What are you choosing to remember? Flow.

II.

Opening to the Unseen                                                                                             A Collaboration

What to do when the world                                                                                        A load to carry

You held spills                                                                               Becomes not only about the load

Past its boundaries                                                                                             But how it is carried

Is knocked over suddenly?                                                                                         One's posture?

Look at it as loss?                                                                                               One's togetherness?

As libation?                                                                                                                The foundation

When the waters flood                                                                                         The knees and feet

After guarding what you loved                                                                                The straightness

For so long,                                                                                                                         The spine

Do you change your name to dove                                                                                The winding

And change what you see as home?                                                                    The waist and hips

Do you see the light that can now shine through                                                 There are lifetimes

After the terror of letting go                                                                           Those who have been 

Has pierced through you?                                                                     Molded in the same grooves

Maybe what falls leads you to a glistening oasis nearby                                               To continue 

A chance for what you held to expand, to connect                                    A tradition of holding on

Or what you have left is enough to be thankful for                                       Across time and space

Maybe you just needed to turn around                                               To see what was always there           

An eternity of work                                                                                                Coming together

Sherese Francis is a Queens, NY-based, Afro-Caribbean-American (Barbados and Dominica) poet, editor, interdisciplinary artist, workshop facilitator, and literary curator of the mobile library project, J. Expressions. She has published work in various publications including Furious Flower, Obsidian Lit, Rootwork Journal, Spoken Black Girl, The Operating System, Cosmonauts Avenue, No Dear, Apex Magazine, Bone Bouquet, African Voices, Newtown Literary, and Free Verse. Additionally, she has published three chapbooks, Lucy’s Bone Scrolls (Three Legged Elephant), Variations on Sett/ling Seed/ling (Harlequin Creature), and Recycling a Why That Rules Over My Sacred Sight (DoubleCross Press).

Selected Works, upfromsumdirt

 

So, To Speak

oceans of thought 

slosh as i am walking

so, to speak 

is to swallow rapids 

and not even noah 

wants these waters

i can not save you if you drown

i will only watch embedded safely 

on shore like an asperous stone-faced 

god chin-deep in the sands—a toothless 

guardian of old with striated songs

…

a jellyfish village 

sloshes 

in my head and 

i awaken violently

like a captive in various stages 

of escape staked as phantasmagoric 

bait near the volcanic rim—i dare 

not lay my head or close my eyes

this fear

of dreams 

with nascent 

affiliation

to the newly 

unknown.

The Ode of Carbon-Copy Anubis

the werewolf with 

the rose tattoo hides

up the holler 

in her mouth—incisors 

down to the bone—my hand,

holding a silver sliver

by its onyx hilt…

she is covered in honey 

(canines guiding calluses)

writing poems of song & roses

jabbing knife’s point 

into Olodumare’s 

inkblack underbelly:

a mobius strip 

of wristblood & 

underbelly blood

all the while, i sit at her side

shooing away bees & howling 

at the moon, my body 

a distant broken planet.

statue of black poet replaces statue of white hero from a not-so-distant race war but neither monument ever held the pigeons at bay and never did the pigeons give a fuck: merry-go-round as political theater

1. 

i am cast in marble in this poem

twenty feet fall standing napoleon-style 

atop a triumph, a thruxton to be correct, 

“i am a cowboy in the boat of ra” tatted 

on my back—unseen, for i wear a billowing 

dress shirt and i do not have on a backwards 

ball cap in this statue. 

in this statue i am black in white marble 

marbled lightly with blue—like good cheese 

tho i am not as salty; head tossed back 

in laughter with neither head nor laugh 

attached to a body for the neck is missing 

—surreal as it is serene; meanwhile, 

in open secret the shoulder-sitting pigeons, 

always in a state of shitting, remain vigilant, 

insider trading as they go about 

in cooing communication on where to find

the best location for popcorn & breadcrumbs 

with the least amount of competition

you see, this black poem is not about race.

this is about american heritage (except 

for the british motorcycle mentioned above, 

culturally balanced at the statue’s base 

by 3 distinct emojis that change daily, but still): 

a riveting contemporary likeness

2. 

“why no neck?” questions the whitest 

of critics for whom unblemished marble 

was made artismal, as sacrosanc as a birthright; 

“if this, as you say, is about culture then why no place 

below the headless head to hold a proper lynch? 

your black poems are all a lie. please, leave us.”

 

3. 

you see, this cord of rope, from the very start,

is a white poem about resistance & representation.

AS IS

the unbeknownst rhythms 

from reanimated tongues

are often hashtagged 

as “the droning on of the heavyhanded” 

within some outdated owner’s manual

the library of stitches in our chest 

deemed an inconsequence 

because our wounds—to some—were 

not so recent and were simply canonized 

as the droning on of mules—or in cozier 

post-production: the goddamn melodies 

of niggardly maladroits decomposing

but that secret is told slant

for when the make of any popular model 

is discountinued, it’s utterly useless (as is well-known)

to update an outdated owner’s manual.

it’s best, by then,

to burn the gravures

and begin anew.

Abolition Is A Form Of Lycanthropy

i stumble into a poem i want to write where a child 

is eating a wolf / i’m concerned for the child, if only 

for a second, so i say “say child, just how did you 

come to, uhh, be eating this wolf?” of course, 

the wolf of is dead with its wide, weary eyes

“say child, this wolf didn’t just, uhh, roll up & deliver 

itself fully plated, so what work of delivery app is this?”

the child (blood on his or her hands, blood dripping from

his or her lips, bites through a bloodied, pelted paunch)

grunts and crouches closer, guarding her or his conquest

the child, snarled in sanguined symmetry, growls at me

hands up i back away

in the periphery of this poem, the wolf-devouring 

eyes of forest urchin sparkle in the surrounding dark, 

dozens upon dozens—tiny gems of slight inquiry reflect 

my impending genocide… then a child in the distance 

child-howls like a half-eaten wolf… branches crack 

in the not-so-distant dark…unless it’s my dry brittle bones 

snapping like branches, every unpruned bough of this 

poem a newly minted metaphor for bone marrow

—my application for a national prize complete

feet up, the dead wolf’s paws begin to cycle

drawing circles in the air at a quickening pace, 

a dead end dreaming of escape… longing for 

the run; the hunt; to feed itself the hand it bites…

“blood-streaked child, i do not have the time for this;

goddammit, i don’t even recall coming to these woods!”

with blood in his or his teeth, she, the snarl-bodied child 

is smiling; leader of the fucking pack but who’s behind it:

capitalistic abolitonists? representational patriarchy? elevator 

pitch for under-funded sci-fi? neoliberal art journals financed 

by conservatives? this modern avant-gardism just isn’t for me: 

merwin and dickinson are the child; i, the half-eaten wolf.

i awoke this morning hungry for figs

and a simple draught of honey for my tea.

the shoes of the fisherman’s wife might be some jive ass slippers but her nightgown is a fishnet

my fingers drop anchor drop into the sea of you

each knuckle joint below your turbulent crest / each knuckle

a kraken, an at-earth’s-end dragon, rattling the bones of atlantis

sunken in songs soft and seismic

each finger an anchor and i am moored to how your flotsum foams

four of your twice-four tentacles thrashing  the octopus that 

at last  discovers

in undulation  flight  

each wave full of salt and thunder and your own two lungs 

thrown as wide as single sail to the wind  mending the nets.

upfromsumdirt is the author of four chapbooks and the full-length collection, Deifying A Total Darkness (Harry Tankoos Books, 2020) available through gumroad.com/ upfromsumdirt. He is a 2010 winner of Kentucky’s Al Smith Award for Art (as Ronald Davis), whose visual work has graced the covers of The African American Review, Tidal Basin Review, Mythium Literary Journal, and various book covers for a variety of published authors. You can view his portfolio at upfromsumdirt.com, and if so moved you can find him across the spectrum of social media sites.

Selected Works, Tom Snarsky

Heart Vegetation Coming In Thick 

I’m studying bug populations in fields 

where airplanes have crash-landed, to see 

how long they remember the heat——days, 

weeks, generations?——if it leads 

to any long-term complications 

or (maybe) any adaptations we wouldn’t 

usually call “accidental” 

in quite this sense, a gray wing 

to match the ash (hide in it, 

obviously, not light it again) or an 

uncanny ability to metabolize the new 

humus all that death 

now reaches downward towards, 

as though a confused dreamer’s hand. 

Sonaten 

1

I grew up surrounded 

By trees so I always thought lightning 

Was hard to see, finding 

The exact bolt, anyway, in a full flash 

Of sky above the canopies. Now 

Where I live storms 

Can be contained over the mountain 

’s shoulder, angry clouds 

Hotwiring the earth, which is a whole 

Different way of understanding 

Thunder——broad, but not 

Total, something you can cover 

With a fist or your favorite song 

But who has just one of those anymore 

1

I do 

It’s called “October” & it’s by 

Jackson C. Frank 

Here’s a link 

https://youtu.be/k9rHxd9rQcs 

I don’t think many people listen 

To that particular upload 

The algorithm’s buried it 

Under other ones 

& covers 

So when I see the view count go up 

I’ll wonder if maybe it’s you 

Dear reader 

Listening 

1

We’re ok 

In the global mist of moonbeams 

We’re ok 

With the little blood of flowers 

We’re ok 

On the mountain on the mountain 

We’re ok 

Picking up the turtle 

We’re ok 

Shepherding him over 

We’re ok 

With how he peed on us a little 

We’re ok 

& he is ambling toward the river 

1

The longest I have ever been silent 

Is nothing 

Compared to the longest I will ever be silent 

Don’t worry I’ve set my spirit 

To auto-loop poems by Georg Trakl  

In my inner voice forever 

When I die, so it won’t be silent 

In the coffin or the urn——

There will be deer 

A sister 

Reds & greens & blues 

& there won’t be 

That rotten underline 

Below Trakl’s name 

1

The longest I have ever been silent 

Was a full performance 

Of H.I.F. Biber’s Mystery Sonatas 

(Aka the Copper-Engraving Sonatas) 

By Christina Day Martinson 

In Boston 

In 2017 

My relationship was falling apart 

Twin Peaks was about to come out 

*Come back 

I was about to ghost 

A whole organization of Maoists 

& I lost all feeling 

In my legs 

1

“The Minimal” by Theodore Roethke 

Has 3.2 stars 

On PoemHunter.com 

https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-minimal/ 

Can’t believe I dignified that 

With two links 

Two lines 

In this poem 

Maybe so I can use this 

As a kind of 

Penitent practice 

Beat myself over the head 

Until I see 

.2 stars 

1

purple balloons 

1

It’s brutal quiet on the pond 

Foggy water 

Fallen tree 

The catfish making public 

Their aversion to corn 

Mr. Toad hopping the byways 

Baby deer becoming 

Adolescent deer becoming 

Adult deer becoming 

Failed plums on the roadside 

I love the mail 

Not getting it 

Like a joke 

About motherhood 

1

Dragging the pond like in a cartoon 

Stick a stage-hook cane in the mud 

& pull 

Free Merlin 

Disturb Roethke’s 

“stone-deaf fishes” 

The sign fish 

Cutting through the water 

Like a bad idea 

I ask my mother-in-law 

What she thinks of the phrase 

“stone-deaf” 

Both signs 

Near the mouth 

1

the warm sutures 

1

Lately I haven’t been remembering 

My dreams, like at all, so 

I’ll invent one: 

Setting is your mom’s house 

On Washington St. 

You just got a giant spider & a snake 

& put them in the same glass 

Prism 

& when I ask you 

If that’s advisable or ok you laugh 

Spit cherry pits at me 

& I pick them all up 

I’m losing the breath control 

I’m losing 

1

A hind interrupts the parade 

Of male animals 

& incomplete stars 

The easiest place to find 

Information about deer 

Terminology is on 

Hunting websites 

My body is one 

Of the purple balloons 

From Jack Spicer 

’s Book of Magazine Verse 

“all cast off together into a raining sky” 

Readily punctured 

Dew-wet 

1

mitered corners 

1

We’re ok 

Hiding fathers in the rainbow 

We’re ok 

Gathering costmary 

We’re ok 

With the whale-shaped laundry basket 

We’re ok 

Putting almost nothing in it

We’re ok 

Telling stories to the swingset 

We’re ok 

Wrist broken by the slide 

We’re ok 

& the cast comes off on Sunday 

1

“Ordinarily 

A dance

In 

Triple

Meter, 

Webern's 

Passacaglia 

Is 

Neither 

A dance 

Nor 

In 

Triple

Meter 

How to Construct a Circle Given Three Points  

The cat is trying to sleep 

off his neck wound from the fox 

It’s deep 

caterpillared with blood 

But he is alive

& snoring 

Sawing wood 

in the barn 

He lacks 

a concept of luck 

But even if he had one 

the pain when he wakes up 

He’ll groom himself 

& not need it

Tom Snarsky is a math teacher who writes poems. His book Light-Up Swan is available from Ornithopter Press. 

White Mountain Deep or Stars Threw Down, AE Reiff

 

It might be the sky but it might be the wind, 

leaving the tent at night in the cold and then not for long. 

You don't get up to hear the coyotes

howling in the range of cross riffs 

and minor notes of the stars.

Interminable I wade through night chest deep.

Turn, restless, turn again. Left side, right side,

back, hope to get escape with dreams, 

wake minutes later, there is no watch, 

but if you can get beneath, like the covers, 

of sleeping bag, the red Hudson's Bay,

the shirts over feet frozen at the bottom of the tent,

then the wind can dance its pile drives

and strokes of mountains leeward can be the dream.

The wind shakes the tent, shakes the aspen up high, descends. 

I wait to be lifted off the ground,

figure to figure out something in the event, 

but then it blows off, new meaning to zephyr 

Blow wind, crack the wind of Pentecost

shake the house. It shakes the mountain now. 

The elk feel it, don't cry, or can't be heard. 

The wind extinguishes everything but itself. 

I know the power of fire and flood, but air is not benign,

blows the elk, coyotes and bear to shelter, 

It doesn't blow the stars.

Under the tree I play them back on the closed eye screen

bright now, Orion rises late in fall. 

I count on it to bring the dawn, 

figure it is maybe three AM,

which gives hope with an air mattress 

and a foot warming wife who accepts them into her thighs.

What does the foot that gets to Nirvana say to the one behind?

"Just one more step."

What does the foot in Nirvana say to the one behind?

"There's no pain hereafter."

What does the cold foot say to the hot?

"Remember me." 

 What does the hand say to the foot 

when the cold foot hotfoots it into warmth?

This goes on through the middle of the night.

 

Red Antares stares at the mountain. 

The meadow to be alive in gold is dark.

All is light. All is bright.

The shadows of dawn, the chow's ears,

the smoke of the fire, coyote song,

elk breaking notes over their knees 

for the fire of dry aspen. 

Even the lonely men in their pickups, 

who patrol the back forest 

where we have gone to escape 

the pipe lines blasting, sleep. 

They can't see an elk in the wood that our boys track,

manage not to get gored by the climacteric of want.

The want. The eye patch. The meaning of cold. 

The trunklessness fallen from fires a decade ago.

AE Reiff is a singer and storyteller who lives in the upper Sonoran Desert. His ceramic murals depict these currents of the wild. He is a native of Philadelphia with two recent collections, The True Light That Lights (Parousia Christian Poetry Chapbook, 2020), and Recon (Trainwreck Press, 2021).

Six Pieces, Verónica Cabanillas

 

Barco-atardecer ancla sobre la playa

El boxedor

El sol negro explota sobre el oceàno pacìfico

La mujer surrealista

La vision del sol

Ser vagina

Verónica Cabanillas Samaniego (Lima, Perú 1981)

Surrealista desde el vientre hasta consumarse. Poeta del ser. Pintora y dibujante; vertedora de universos paralelos. Soñadora ferviente de todos los mundos imposibles para hacerlos posibles aquí y hoy. Sombra negra que atravesó el delirio para poder ver los subterráneos mundos del cosmos interior y exterior, y sacar de allí, la formula de una salvación en curso. Luz violenta y brillante que subvierta nuestra terrible condición humana.

Ha expuesto en Europa y Latinoamérica con el surrealismo internacional, y han sido publicados poemas, dibujos y pinturas en publicaciones de diferentes partes del mundo como, Francia, Colombia, España, Canadá, Egipto, Inglaterra, Brasil, Chile, Bolivia, Usa, Costa Rica.

The belly of the dog, Alexandros Zochios

 

            Everyday, when I come home from work, I notice one of my personal objects has gone missing. The last one was a framed photo of myself in front of the Eiffel tower. Before that, my suit, which I left hanging on the chair for work; only some linen strips were scattered on the wooden floor. That’s why I suspected it was my dog. That and the guilt in her puppy-eyes. One other time I discovered a feather here and there from the pillow that I place over my favorite spot on the sofa – like leftovers of prey hunted in the countryside. I even asked for advice from a trainer and all he told me was that she suffers from separation anxiety. I think she is just hungry all the time.

            While I am away from home I wonder what she has swallowed this time. She has already made my collection of Shakespeare’s sonnets disappear. I imagine her bloated stomach struggling to digest each verse, each page, while they twirl endlessly in her tummy. I know she is not normal. I knew ever since I found her: tiny and weak in a hole in the ground. But I wouldn’t give her away, I love her too much.

            Now, at long last, she has found a way to open my bedroom door. That’s how she made the photo of my trip on my bedside table vanish. She seems to choose everything that is valuable to me. Maybe that’s her purpose: to devour the world around me. The house is now empty, stripped naked from everything that suggests I've ever lived here, apart from the sofa where my dog with her starving eyes, is now lying upon. Next to her I sit, waiting. My memories are somewhere inside her belly, as if she has built my home inside of her. Though, her starving eyes are letting me know that it is not yet complete. Her teeth are sharp enough so as to not leave any traces. It’s time for me to lie down, under her open mouth.

Alexandros Zochios works at I.T. in Athens, Greece. He has been published in a Greek speculative fiction anthology, as well as, in a Greek sci-fi magazine and he wants to reach English-speaking readers. His last two flash stories have been published in English. One of them in "all the sins" and the other in the "Conversations" anthology published by Kingston University Press (2018).

Two Poems, Marika Preziuso

Accents: A Manifesto

I booked a blow job at two - I declare

to the large man at a London Supercut. 

A blow ….what?  shouts he over blasting dryers 

Sounding hopeful.

21, holding a tiny dictionary in my left hand.

Freshly off my boat.

How are you doing honey? asks the lady 

At the college town check-out, somewhere south.

and all I do is unravel my immigrant drama,

 a line of impatient patrons growing out my back. 

Hoping - but suspecting - that she did not mean 

how I was really doing.

32, on a student visa without credit cards. 

Freshly off my boat.

An accent is an accent is an accent.

An accent is welcome/exotic/ shame-filled/ opting silence. 

An accent is charming. Curiosity Invited. Beguiling.

An accent is cilantro/garnish/ decorative/ lovely.

An accent is an exit door, a deceptive map, an escape plan.

An accent straddles two worlds.

At least.

An accent is the estrangement of family.

Mis-translating ahead. All the time. 

Faking spontaneity, when family is obvious scheming & fault lines.

An accent is code-switching, confused dreaming, 

Emboldened Scusa & Ti voglio bene & Per sempre.

Of a secret love language until your lover 

Types these in Google Translate.

An accent is a stubborn escoria of places never quite home:

When Cuba no longer welcomed my interviews to political exiles,

When London rents went off the roof,

When I stopped being Elena Ferrante 

for Americans who never spent more than three days in Naples ( you say is safe there?),

When Rome became too dump and provincial,

I handed a pile of fears at customs.

Tongue-lost,

English-compassed,

I kept an accent, 

The only betrayal I still trust.

Smagliature di significato: A Palimpsest Poem

Una silhouette di donna of a certain age,

una figura incerta,

from behind, leaning over her son

in a sunny avenue.

Una calza smagliata. 

Ripped. 

Solo una.

 

And I think: how familiar,

How dishonest, perturbante,

a map can be

when worn down to the bone. 

 

How precious, how delicate 

is mother’s fabric on my skin

that opens up, loosens up

                       Inevitabilmente.

 

Her words

are smagliature di significato:

They either cluster or intermit,

her silk tearing up, 

trailing stubbornly behind my story

 

always ahead of it.

 

I lean towards her mouth to listen 

and I am in awe 

with the many layers of meaning

She is not aware of.

 

Beneath her common sense 

and uncommon sadness

my mother’s heart smaglia.

                            Inevitabilmente.

Marika Preziuso is Professor of World Literature at the Massachusetts College of Arts and Design, in Boston (MA), where she teaches 20th century and contemporary postcolonial literature by migrant and diasporic writers, speculative fiction of the uncanny and Afrofuturist literature.  Marika is a trilingual writer, a RYT yoga instructor, and a meditation guide. She infuses the embodied, reflective qualities of these practices in her poetry, which investigates various states of liminality and mis-translation and the ways these complicate any poetic intersection of self, craft, and culture. Marika’s recent poetry experiments with strategies of linguistic resistance and cultural opacity to challenge nation-bound imaginaries of Americanness, Britishness, Italianness (among other "-nesses"), and their attendant exoticization of "foreign others". For more about Marika’s work and writing, visit www.marikapreziuso.com

Three Poems, Philip Chijioke Abonyi

Origin of water 

everything cloudy

has water inside it

when you dissect 

tears what exactly 

do you find 

if not a dark images? 

rivers are women

weeping over their dead juveniles

streams are girls who misplaced

their innocence in the territory of dogs 

seas are the survivors of war 

mourning the dead 

lakes are men grieving 

silently over their lives.

water is not colorless/

tasteless or odorless

it is dark in the eyes of a child whose mother is drowning

bitter in the mouth of a shadow lost in love & torment 

sweet on any skin caressed by sunlight. every human is a solidified water

that liquidizes under the heat of hurt. 

THE STREET IN MY MOTHER'S BACK

my mother says she feels

a heavily loaded trailer running

in the symmetric street in her back,

sometimes it drives down to her waist 

and parks there, 

each time her eyes gallop far into her skull 

and her torso takes the look of a broomstick. 

ten years ago I remember

a medic jerks out her blood and says it's not dirty. go home she will be fine. she walked home only to sit on the jaws of pain that teeth her into hopeless shadow. 

we recoup a cold water 

to suppress the fire on her waist 

as every night she becomes screams 

and sighs 

wishing for everything dark to swallow her

we make fire some days when she becomes snow wishing for sunlight

we sit near her eyebrows

cheering her eyes up

so there won't be rainfall. sometimes it seems her tread of life is about kissing 

the lips of scissors/

fear becomes soldiers marching into our body/ we burn ourselves in prayer 

psalm after psalm

until this trailer drives away to visit again 

the coming year. it's again the time 

my mother says she is hearing 

a horn somewhere in her body 

everything she holds is falling apart

I recoil into my bones 

praying that it won't be the trailer. someone tell me please,

how can my mother block this road?

if the pain is a living thing, when'll it die?

This annual visitor wants to go home 

with my mother. Never.

living behind walls

mother says there is no way

to Jerusalem for the shadows

that cannot reflect,

darkness means—to hit your 

head on the floor/run your hands

around your beads,

or to give kola nut to the sun, seek

life from the torso of yesterdays.

I grew up in my mother's reflection,

my room is built in the pages 

of bibles. the only road I know is from genesis to revelation,

mother always tell me

this is where I will find my allies. 

say psalm is a friend to be trusted in times of thunder, 

John is the only key that unlocks the 

body of God.

I grew up carrying walls to places,

Chioma who lives next door has tried to climb the wall

but my mother said there is a devil in her mini skirt.

Okon was devasted waiting for a day 

I will fly across for us to join the city butterflies. 

Aisha tested grief in my mother's words 

when she tried to share her tongue with me.

I grew up knowing how to run away

from voices,

how to hide from the conversation

of streets,

or crawl into a shell of silence when there are noises 

of mosque or mausoleum.

I grew up knowing 

how to walk into my mother's body 

and lock the door behind shadows with opaque,

I never cross the wall to know the world.

Philip Chijioke Abonyi was born at Nsukka in the igbo country of the east state of Nigeria. He was educated at Government College(Css) Ada Obollo Etiti and Anambra state polytechnic. He has lived an active literary life uplifting modern African Literature. His poetry is noted for its artistry, descriptive power and the way in which he draws on his locality for imagery and ideas. He was shortlisted for Eriata Oribhabor Poetry Prize, 2018. His work has appeared in African writer's magazines, AceWorld, Eve magazine, qwenu, Allpoetry, Tushstories, spriNG, Praxis magazine, Eboquill, Nantygreens, and elsewhere.  

Selected Works, Kenneth Wagner

Today’s Version of Us  

we are bears on the verge of suicide

doors with no sense of direction

we are white doves misused in a deep angry war

by worn windows and rust-colored chains

and the back fence is trying to say it’s not leaving

as old berries thorn under our tree 

we are apples that sit in cheap seats with drunks

we hear harps play on steps to a bridge

the earth has gone and surrounded us again

and oceans have lifted their skirts 

and you tell me we are more circles than squares 

with some untied knots east of here

and I tell you today is our own copper time

because tomorrow we live in midair

Depreciating 

light pours in these curious days - warping

floorboards and worrying leather chairs

ceiling fans ticker below web-draped 

rafters   doors list in frames   window panes leak 

and the house expands and contracts with the day 

how like me this building slowly fades

path worn and lived in with chipped baseboards 

and buckling walls that mimic

our mutual descent

just as the wobbly banister 

and crooked stairs report the weight of age

the orchestral creak of the front door hinge

tunes to the settling of the house 

and synchronizes 

our calamity   perfectly

I Only Remember the Moment

Do you remember that thought that slanted 

like sunshine through the glass 

then reflected into a greater idea and grew

out past my imagined self 

little snaps of light crackling in front of me

as the idea dripped on the back of my tongue

and I spoke the thought turned idea in one breath 

I was glazed over with the knowledge

sitting in that chair   I couldn’t believe

I had captured a meaning so huge   

the weight of thought bent around 

and absorbed into me   wiping away

the remnants of uncertainty

it was formed so perfectly clear even 

the dog nodded in agreement

that deep question only gods answer

The Geometry Teacher

a truncated cone 

with soft blue eyes

and rumpled clothes

he taught dimensional

zero in a monotone voice

that made heads loll

he saw only shapes 

not colors   and knew

no one else could see

the triangular birds

tessellating 

the warm air

in a quiz   he’d whiffle

down the aisle   his worn

corduroy slacks whispering

him to the back of the class

where he’d stare out 

the rectangular windows

and dream

of rhombus flowers

hiding quadrilateral cats

Vacation   

I’d find a room in the bark of an old pine tree

and in the morning raft the ridges

to the forest floor   then burrow under

needles and leaves to the spa of a nurse log

I could hang suspended over Saguaros

in the retinal nerve of a vulture’s eye

rising and falling on thermal air

to see how dead bodies look like a banquet 

wouldn’t it be nice to be the wall the fly lands on

and how peaceful to spend a week

as a broken window in an abandoned house

the tension of holding off weather relaxed

the constant fear of rock-toting boys dismissed

I could lounge on the half-drawn page of an animator’s desk after dark

or pitch a tent inside a circle left 

on the chalkboard in a second-grade class

while the summer sun heats the scent 

of white paste and watercolor paint

but I’ve settled for this long drive with the dog

over a pass to a two lane straight away 

where warm air buffets my ears 

and the dog   head out the back-seat window

pants to the beat of inconsistent fence posts 

Kenneth Wagner lives in the Pacific Northwest; he has had the fortune being David Wagoner’s student and teaching assistant at Hugo House in Seattle for eleven years.  Kenneth has also taught poetry, art, and theatre in primary schools (pre-pandemic) and found that third graders are the most daring artistically and physically - of the K-12 lot that call themselves kids.