Rough Fugue Poems by Betty Adcock (Reviews and Mentions)

April 16, 2022 Post a Comment

Issue 20 Cover

Rip by Steven DaLuz

2d Look — Negritude

Red-Tail Hawks at Noon

Two black heaven-anchors silhouetted
Against the noonday sun.

They circle overhead
Hunting with hundred-story scope

A field mouse ignorant of fate.
They mate for life. A loftier nest

In our woodlot. Every flavor
Sees them soaring. It is said

They'll hook talons in their
Sexual dance. I've never seen that

Only the rust flash of their tails
Equally they arise the thermals.

Their unmistakable cry rids the world
Of mercy. Oh, crucibles of

Blood and hunger, how we long to
Believe in something.

Joan Colby'due south Selected Poems received the 2013 FutureCycle Prize and Ribcage was awarded the 2015 Kithara Book Prize. Her contempo books include Carnival from FutureCycle Press, The Seven Heavenly Virtues from Kelsay Books and Her Heartsongs from Presa Printing. Her latest books are Joyriding to Nightfall from FutureCycle Press and Elements from Presa Press.

Rise

There is the light
and what the light does

when the fog sails over
the chalky calanchi ridges

when the volcanic tufa stone
is softened sepia past the sun.

We alive here on a pinnacle of clay.

Thinning layers yield to time,
slipping down the cliff in silent descent.

In that location is the seeing
and what we make of the seeing.

Between is the loftier break bridge,
long, steep, unforgiving in the wind.

We climb and are risen into this improbable myth.

Before nosotros enter the walled city
we cannot know what lies inside.

The bridge is the umbilical cord.

Without it we have no h2o, gas, electricity
no reddish vino, no toilet newspaper, nothing to eat

no eager tourists capturing images of the dying metropolis

they bring prosperity to the restaurant possessor
who demonstrates the olive printing

once powered by blindfolded donkeys
trudging in circles to crush

the olives that grew plump
on the trees that basted in the sun.

Some days we are alone here, yielding to the fog.

Those who stay become radars of
deject density, zephyr, starlight, and dream.

Why make something when seeing is enough?

If we have no need to traverse the bridge
nosotros tin can live within these walls forever.

Amy Gottlieb'due south poems accept appeared in the Ilanot Review, Storyscape, SWWIM, On Being, Bloomsbury Album of Contemporary Jewish American Poetry, and elsewhere. Her debut novel, The Beautiful Possible, was a finalist for the Ribalow Prize, Wallant Award, and a National Jewish Book Award.

Woman Thinking Before the Blow

L.A. Freeway, 21st Century

All twenty-four hour period I am tossed into objects, their screens
vicious with graphs, spreadsheets, memos,
orders to make full, to deny, to render.

My iPhone has tentacles, abstractions wearing
occupational smiles. How can I ask to be
found, my ankles twined nether my desk?

The others surround me, young women I released
from myself, a skinful of pigeons repeating, repenting.
They're my successions, our molting, our mourners'
gait. Nosotros tin explode. We tin wait.

I asked for the time and got bad lovers, keys,
lipsticks, transparent dreams, a litany
of puzzles. The coming familiar
took shape in thin air.

Effectually my pharynx, under the silk scarf,
at that place'due south a jumprope, a knotted belt and the thin
string from the psychiatrist's window-blind.
The stem of my tongue aches with silence.

In minutes my bones will intermission
through ruby walls of my flesh, ribs, knees,
spine unlocked, instant undoing encarmine
as bedclothes property a pocketknife
on the wrong weekday forenoon.

As if in a nifty air current, my auburn hair
will get out from me similar something sung.

Betty Adcock is author of seven collections of poems from LSU Printing, nearly recently Rough Fugue (2017) and a chapbook, Widow Poems, from Jacar Press. Her awards include the North Carolina Accolade for Literature, the Poets' Prize, the Texas institute of Letters Prize, and a Guggeneheim Fellowship in Poetry. She taught at Meredith College, NC Land University, and the low residency Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers.

I desire to learn this song—

a man tells me he sang information technology in one case, in an elevator shaft—
some people merely know where the best
acoustics dwell.

I become weepy when I think of it—all graffiti and damp,
a cringe of piss in the air, the song
like a dried dandelion

blown three stories and the bass notes—maintenance,
a few buildings downwardly, with their jackhammers,
knocking out a hunk

of greenspace where the almost man parts of u.s.a. are
immune to suspension—cigarettes pinched
betwixt lips—a conspiracy

to keep united states from singing. My god, I want to unpack
and spend at least three weeks between
the strings, take someone

slide their fingers across my skin, and while I'm not
ordinarily fond of being muted, I might
forgive that pressure

holding me steady. I tell him that I'm going to return
equally a musician in my side by side life. If I can
grasp a few chords now,

embody the vibrations. If I can learn to move
between frets with a cleaved string.
I'll trample trying.

I'll press the emergency button betwixt floors.
I'grand a raw nerve and that vocal is a horsehair
castor, excellent.

Megan Merchant is an editor at The Comstock Review and Pirene'south Fountain. Her latest book, Earlier the Fevered Snow, will come into the world with Stillhouse Press in April 2020.

Unpacking

Yous admit that the hush of night
is unbearable alone. This nosotros take
in common, the need for some other'southward
breath to see us through till morn.
I recollect of the bodies that accept been
here before. Their outlines
sinking
into the memory foam
of your mattress, leaving
secrets for the next to detect buried
from the night earlier. Look
at me — I am of reluctant glory.
I close my eyes the whole fourth dimension we're
touching.
You whisper mine, mine
to the body, declaring
each part for the taking
with the trail of your tongue.
Do yous know how information technology feels
to exist a passenger in your ain
agonized
pare? You are wicked, hungry,
cunning, lone. Y'all cannot hide
this from me, information technology spills from your mouth
like loose teeth. What are we only spectators?
Our basic glued to the walls
so nosotros must watch ourselves
unfurling.

Taylor Edmonds is a poet and performer from South Wales. Her work has been published by BBC Sesh, Wales Arts Review, Butcher's Domestic dog Magazine, The Cheval Anthology, Black Bender, The Cardiff Review and more. Taylor is also a squad fellow member of Where I'm Coming From Cardiff open mic platforming BAME writers in Wales.

The bodies were moving.
They were saying, We live. We
exercise zippo else.

Margarita Serafimova'due south work has been nominated for many awards, including a Pushcart Prize. Her chapbook, A Surgery of A Star (Staring Problem Press), is forthcoming. Her piece of work appears widely, including Nashville Review, LIT, Agenda, Poetry Due south, London Grip, Waxwing, A-Small-scale Magazine, Trafika Europe, Noble / Gas Qtrly, Obra/Artifact, Keen Weather for Media, Origins Magazine, Nixes Mate Review, Moria and elsewhere.

原爆 – Cantlet

how quickly
the torso unfolds
similar a paper crane,

unremembered
like a fish
in the silent sea
of floating fish:

black rain
leaves only a son's shadow
memorialized in a wall.

A girl remains
as just a name
in the tummy
of a Nagasaki lunchbox.

A adult female's body
wears glass shards
similar osteoderms,

still conveying the child
across a carbon-black world.
The child holds firmly
the adult female'south manus, even when

the maggots come,
even as she hungers, even
when this nuclear rapture

has removed her mother,
she holds.

Meg Eden's work appears in Prairie Schooner, Poetry Northwest, Crab Orchard Review, RHINO and CV2. She teaches creative writing at Anne Arundel Community College. She is the writer of five poetry chapbooks, the novel Post-High School Reality Quest (2017), and the forthcoming poetry drove Drowning in the Floating World (2020). She runs the Magfest MAGES Library weblog.

Ode to Fire

"Wildfires have devastated Commonwealth of australia, incinerating an
surface area roughly the size of W Virginia and killing 24 people and every bit
many as half a billion animals." —The New York Times.

In bed, my child sleeps under
a coating, his eyes closed against
the bulb that beams in the room.
Some nights I strike a matchstick
to illuminate the room, to see my
child in bed, asleep. In the news,
a country becomes ash. The remains
of animals litter everywhere,
each burnt animal a history
of a country ravaged past burn.
Sometimes I imagine my child
being snatched away from me
by the violence of everything in
the world. This night there are dead
animals, unburied. I feel these
animals could be our children,
burned; I feel these animals
could be us, expressionless, silent in
a world that is unkind to us.

Rasaq Malik'south work has appeared or is forthcoming in Prairie Schooner, Crab Orchard Review, Rattle, New Orleans Review, Spillway, Poet Lore, Michigan Quarterly Review, I, Minnesota Review, and elsewhere. He won Honorable Mention in 2015 Best of the Net for his poem "Elegy," published in One.

The Flag is Bleeding, 2019

after Faith Ringgold's quilt, The Flag is Bleeding (1997)

20-1 stars pin this mother's grief
to majestic blue, the sclera of her eyes, reddish.
She can no longer see, no longer count.
Her easily press against her Sunday dress
her remaining son, her remaining daughter
—still moisture from the bathroom—withal rubber
in their unknowing. They stand up on tiptoe,
ane on each of her broad dark-brown feet, to keep
her from falling, from reading with her fingertips
the blooming glyphs of blood, names
of massacred in this country
she's even so afraid to telephone call domicile.

Multilingual poet María Luisa Arroyo's latest chapbook, Destierro Means Ways More Exile, pays tribute to 32 women poets. Her poems appear in journals such as The Common and anthologies, including Boricua en la Luna. Currently, she is Assistant Professor of Writing & Kickoff-Year Studies at Bay Path University.

The Brother My Parents Almost Adopted

I about grew up with a homo in this world,
but my male parent had a major middle assault
right before the baby boy was supposed to make it
from Maine I think. Cipher baby, a circumstance
miscarriage, something for my female parent to mourn?

I tin can look at any 54-year-old American male person and wonder,
are yous adopted, did we virtually share a childhood, a life?
I'm sure he grew up somewhere, maybe with a sister.
Maybe he passed southbound on the highway as we headed up
to Lake Winnepesaukee once, a cherry-red Toyota Camry doing 55,
simply beyond the median strip.

If Dad's artery hadn't jammed close
that August, nosotros would've known each other
more completely than anyone knows us.
We could've discussed why the folks
acted strange some days. I could've questioned
dominance sooner. I might've learned better how to argue,
seeing father-son head-butting.

He would've pulled my orbit into an oval, fabricated me share the spotlight
and dessert more. I could've learned the art of protective sweetness.
Mom could've spread her skills around, non focused solely on me. Hurrah!
Dad could've had grandchildren sooner, seen his surname live on. A brother
might've helped visit Ma, make clean out her flat, and notarize forms.

Oh, my kids could have an uncle.
I miss someone faceless, scentless,
someone no ane I know has always met,
or if they did, how would I know?
No 1 knows my childhood only me.

Tina Kelley's Rise Wildly is forthcoming from CavanKerry Printing, joining Abloom & Awry, Precise, and The Gospel of Galore, which won the Washington State Book Award. She co-authored About Habitation: Helping Kids Motion from Homelessness to Hope, and shared in a Pulitzer covering nine/xi at The New York Times.

Aspens

Terminal night, the fool in me waking,
equally if one-half-drunk, wanted to dance
when the wind came upwards, insistent as surf,
and lofted my bedroom window's sheers
like veils about my shoulders. A wish,
a whoosh, a clacking similar castenets
moved through the limbs of the aspens

that border my lawn, had set them
dervishing, the whole congregation,
moonlit, on tiptoes, equally if in frenzied
praise of a god fabricated manifest, riding
on a sweep of current of air, and I felt sure
the aspens would endure again
the quaking electric current of that ecstasy.

In low-cal it's hard not to believe
optimism is just stubborn pretense.
This morn iii trees lay felled,
the roots exposed similar hacked bones
in opened graves. I've stood earlier
in the stillness of afterstorm,
the everywhereness of it, among litter

strewn from far corners of my brain—
the stutter and static of news, brittling
light-green torn from clichés of hope
and tides of war and brewing storm—
and stared into a wreckage of words
left abased on the page
as if I'd never been that god of weather.

Then I wield again the grumbling
seize with teeth of a chain saw. I'll make cracking cords
of nuisance. I'll hitch the stumps
to a truck and yank them out
piece of cake as teeth, easy equally taking a rake
to polish over what's past, tamp it flat
with my muck boots in a foolish dance.

Richard Foerster's eighth drove is Boy on a Doorstep: New and Selected Poems (Tiger Bark Press, 2019). His numerous honors include the "Discovery"/The
Nation Accolade, Poesy'south Bess Hokin Prize, a Maine Arts Committee Fellowship, the Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship, and ii NEA Poesy Fellowships. He lives in Eliot, Maine.

Firenze

October, walking along the Arno, glazed in the saffron light
of late afternoon. . . Earlier, nosotros'd been to the Accademia,
seen David—Stop looking. I know you're looking—said
the lecturer—the dimples on his knees, his magnificent culo.
What would it be like to spend only i night with that perfect human being?
Today, the imperfections of our crumbling bodies become more evident:
my grinding knees, your screaming plantar fasciitis, which sent
you lot back to our hotel in a cab while I toured the Uffizi lonely.
Only oh, La Primavera! I want to exist Flora, clothed in flowers:
forget-me-nots, daisies, buttercups, poppies, carnations, wild roses
circling my waist. Simply instead, I'm an aging woman in sensible shoes,
walking along the river lonely, the light turning shifting shades
of tea-rose, lilac, peach, light that might be the lacquer of an old master.
I am trying non to stumble on the uneven pavement, trying non to crash-land
into impossibly chic women coming out of Gucci and Prada
carrying designer numberless. The Ponte Vecchio looks tempting,
but we take dinner reservations near our hotel, where nosotros will hobble
3 blocks on the cobblestones, so swallow crostini, bistecca alla fiorentina,
Chianti, meringhe con fragole. Age may take painted us into a corner,
tempered our desires, simply when we finally lie down at dark, laying down
the burdens of tendons and knees, we'll pull up, not the high thread count
sheets of this fine hotel, but the waters of the Arno at dusk, colors of Prosecco,
Bellinis, and let them carry usa off into the arms of night'southward soft chiaroscuro—

Barbara Crooker is the author of ix books of poetry including Some Glad Morning (Pitt Poesy Serial). Her piece of work has appeared in many anthologies, including The Bedford Introduction to Literature, Commonwealth: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania, The Poesy of Presence and Nasty Women: An Unapologetic Anthology of Destructive Poesy.

Solo Anniversary

Why would the clock
seem to run backwards
on just this night,

the night we married
in the parlor of our Upstate habitation
and collection the small grouping

of friends and invited relatives
through a blinding snowstorm
advisedly, carefully

to the white Victorian inn
nosotros'd booked past the canal
for everyone to share our promises.

Unused to snow, or once-in-a-decade
snow similar this, they followed
in a slow line behind,

trying to take hold of
at one mile an hour
the dim red burst of our lights

fitfully coming and going
like comets through the awful storm.
Leading, I kept one eye

on the vanishing route ahead
and 1 on the ghostly
shapes behind, trying to gauge

the danger of everything.

Stan Sanvel Rubin'due south piece of work was most recently in Wilderness House Literary Review, Agni, Georgia Review, the 25^th anniversary consequence of Atlanta Review and For the Dearest of Orcas. His fourth full-length drove, At that place. Here., was published past Lost Horse Printing. He lives on the northern Olympic Peninsula of Washington.

Confessio (Why I Sink Deep to Seek Recluse in a Canteen)

Nosotros were collywobbles and
our wings
formed cusps on fresh leaf
under a yellow sun.
We spoke in whispers and the softness
of our words was affirmed by
twin doves
hanging on to coo downwards praises.

Nosotros were called the amateurs
and we clasped that proper name to
our chests, building a castle to house it.
But this was not dissimilar every paradise—
someone eats an apple, any apple: crispin, braeburn
honeycrisps or jonagold
and all goes back to dust.

I still come across y'all walking abroad
from the lighted lone door which
I had kept locked for some time.
I hear your ghost traipsing
with cleaved
steps on pieces of broken
mirror, heading for the door
equally night falls.
I have gone in to permit loose
the bird you lot tied to my bed
frame but it will non fly.

Lukpata Lomba Joseph is Nigerian. He writes for an online weekly magazine, Joshua'southward Truth. His piece of work has also appeared in the New York Academy'south Caustic Frolic Journal, Even so Point Magazine, Due south Florida Poetry Journal, Squawk Dorsum Journal, Poetry NI'southward FourXFour Periodical and elsewhere. Lukpata has special involvement in works that explore internal dissonance.

Tenebrae

Churches are all-time for prayer that have the to the lowest degree light.
— John Donne

It looks the same.
Shadowy crosses tremble in the long aisle.

Saints recede into the dark of archways.
The organ softly takes upwards existence lost—a small-scale key,
somber, remote.

The congregation'southward soft garments shift their folds,
aligning with the murmur of prayer.

Down all these years it returns, the club of service.
I follow to the end.
I leave in silence.

I wasn't looking for a fashion back,
only to close the mean solar day against an old error.
A mean solar day as long every bit always.
An error fifty-fifty longer.

Marjorie Stelmach'due south 6th poesy collection, I Chair, Ane Evening, is upcoming from Ashland Poetry Press. Her poems have previously appeared in I, Gettysburg Review, Hudson Review, Image, Prairie Schooner, and others. She is the recipient of the 2016 Chad Walsh Verse Prize from The Beloit Poetry Periodical.

Dancing in Time

Every loss is a religion somewhere,
all rivers rice civilization.

Each of us has a home
silence away from home

Each ane has a destination
here, there, somewhere.

Each of united states volition leave the globe unseen
pyres, graves, coffin.

All streams will not reach the sea
some take other paths.

All of us wait for the clock
old, busy hours

Killing united states of america every solar day, every moment
building a new faith somewhere.

Far and abroad from my doorways
far from these trees, the stream of Dulung.

Leaving backside all contacts
of Prince Anwar Shah Road.

Long nights have away my sleep
silent doors know my heaves of sighs.

My towels have your name

hours run, tick tock. Breaking me.

Notation: Dulung is a small river in westward Bengal, India. It flows through tribal villages of Jhargram district.

Jaydeep Sarangi has published eight collections in English, latest being: Eye Raining the Light. His translations have appeared in Geetanjali and Beyond (Scotland), BTR, Transnational Literature, Indian Literature, Pegasus and elsewhere. He is the Secretary of Intercultural Poetry and Functioning Library, ICCR, Kolkata, and the Vice President of Gild of Indian English Writers Editors and Critics.

Afterwards Hiking the Declension

with my first beloved and his married woman

We've been 3 days, touching
the tide pools: her body a silhouette of mine;
Leo just a lilliputian higher in the heaven, his paw
over Jupiter; our profiles, nearly ane
in the reflected calorie-free.

Between the citrus scented needles
we've bound to boutonniere, and the pino nuts
wrested from the cone, she holds me
in that common space, laughs how little yous've bent
your fate in our substitution.

A rest on the rocks, our anxiety sinking
into the sleek and marbled pebbles. Translucent
like them, we glow under a millennium of waves,
spotter you watching the horizon. She pushes the curls
from my face, grasps my hand against falling,
tells me I am for you
a bit of grace
and healing.

With the current of air, I say
There's nothing left in him
of me. With your optics, she says
he is the wild, uplifted sea.

The decade nosotros've come up to alienation
has y'all layered out similar so many old leaves
over yourself: faded sketches
for the utilise of roots, weeds.

My Achilles attachment sings this; one
moment y'all are a grayness-haired stranger
in that song. The adjacent, my young, and lonely love.

Over the shoals, I try to speak of it: a tenderness:
your mitt to each of us in turn, feet braced across a puddle;
that moment arm in arm, after you've defenseless the terminal
shimmer of sun, reckless and fleeting
off the crest of my cheek; your mitt
securing me to the footholds of the cliff.

You will spend an hour rubbing menthol and eucalyptus
into this ache.

For the brusque drive to the drome
you lot wrap me in your gear, and I tin can think
simply of your father, speechless
with this fear for you, pulling this same hat
downwards over the edges
of your ears, against the winter
and the pelting.

Information technology'southward all there, in that small-scale belongings:
the shared exhale, the pause before turning
to the curbside, grasping at the luggage
tipping into our feet.

Sherre Vernon is a seeker of a mystical grammar and a recipient of the Parent-Writer Fellowship at MVICW. She has two award-winning chapbooks: Green Ink Wings and The Proper name is Perilous. Readers depict Sherre'due south work equally heartbreaking, richly layered, lyrical and intelligent.

The Weight of Him

In the dental chair, my heart banging
against my ribs like a prisoner
in a burning jail, I remember
how cold Dad was, in cashmere coat,
well-shined leather shoes, shivering
as we walked from E Terminate to York,
each stride he took, among his terminal on Globe.

I imagine gravity dragging at his weight,
the heavy slowness of his gait.
If each of us cannot exist anywhere
other than where nosotros are, delight explain
how I connect with the dead like this,
whenever the dental dam goes in,
whenever they say to me, be still.

Laura Foley's seventh collection of poetry is Why I Never Finished My Dissertation. Her work has won the Common Good Books poetry contest, Joe Gouveia Outermost Poetry Contest, Atlanta Review Grand Prize, Foreword Review Poetry Prize and others. A palliative care volunteer, she lives with her married woman among the hills of Vermont.

Lepus timidus

'And so soft
is the fur
of the currently–'
Louise Mathias, Larrea

Tundra hare, turned
white before the snows,
your new hibernate exposes
tender flesh to undue clarity.

Your slender weight
sows narrow pathways
of terror management
betwixt nightfall and daybreak

every bit you run uphill on the scree,
screaming the eagle away.
Territories of nibbled bilberries
and heather betray you.

Still your fur shivers,
awaiting the winter at its elevation
to match your pelt'south maturity.
Winter might merely strip us blank.

Heidi Williamson is Royal Literary Fund Fellow at the University of East Anglia. She teaches for The Verse Schoolhouse, Poesy Society, National Centre for Writing and The Writing Jitney. Her two honor-winning Bloodaxe collections are The Print Museum and Electrical Shadow. Her third drove, Return by Minor Road is due out from Bloodaxe in April 2020.

Winter Street

the black mountains ascent up
cities cloud-urban citadels
not the crow clang-tapping
a tin post not the screel and
soar of the gull can preclude
information technology tails of berries strew the basis
littered already with wasp-hasps
wet leaves rain washed the copse
out my body in its wet and dry out
calls yours it does not yearn for
you I can snap your image from
my listen at the crossing where

life is my soul doing but as theirs
in their everyday I sentry them
carry their validities similar groceries
the realities of their lives across
streams of traffic observing the
marvel of their feet carrying weight
my feet-of-clay are in their wintering
continuing her observing reds deep
dark greens I wish you away and
move into them into their flow
bit by scrap the mountains have
dissolved behind houses as magic

cities surely do crows worry the
long wet grass and the gull
has soared to the sea red berries
impinge when I crack their blood
-bags into the footing their juices
carmine underfoot I selection the threads
snip them at their roots tidying this
box of sharp things scissors and
needles neat and sweet the box
smells of vanilla freesia and some
other affair I put the scissors away
information technology smells of cedar

Chris Murray lives in Dublin. She founded and curates Poethead; a poetry blog dedicated to platforming work by women poets, their translators and editors. She is an agile member of Fired! Irish Women Poets and the Canon which seeks to celebrate and draw sensation to the rich cultural heritage of Irish women poets through readings. Her latest book is 'bind' (Turas Press, 2018)

What If Déjà Vu Is Merely

moments that resonate?
Disquieting equally this road
which seems to signify
You must permit become
snaking effectually each
blind curve, each mile-
marker similar a tombstone
for the last. Similar so many
times before, I must say
No. Don't want to.
Can't. What if? to every unknowable bend.
As a child I believed the moon
was an middle, the look inside information technology
ambiguous—celestial, round
with want—meaning we can't know
if it ways us harm.
All the same those beams drag ghostly
nails across my windshield,
conjure the white noise
betwixt the white lines: years
when the hum inside
was not the peace that childhood
promised. Even now the luminescent
rail flash unevenly, echo
the anxious creek rattling below.
So when the eyes gleam
into the circuit of
unbroken high beams—What if—
I'grand of a sudden hurled
to the moment when—information technology all ends
like a question—the automobile hit and the soul
ejected—with a stammer
and a lilt—
like a backfiring roman candle
in the astonished boy'southward hands.

Erica Lee Braverman's poems take appeared or are forthcoming in Puerto del Sol, Hotel Amerika, Radar Verse, Due north American Review, Passages N, Hayden'southward Ferry Review, Descant, Poetry Northwest, Poet Lore, So to Speak, and elsewhere. She's nominated for a Pushcart Prize from Passages North, and received an MFA from the Academy of Oregon. She lives in Portland.

A Portrait of My Grandmother as a Greenish Woman

Different others, I pluck this from my orchard of memory with ease: I,
a seeded cornball at variance with Gran, threatening to get out back for
the city. It is a retentivity plaited into distant afternoons when our song
ran cold, and the anthem of our bond muddied by a wispy cloud of tiff.

An evening in her village, in the calendar month of two festivals—i, yam, the
other, town—I trudged backside in blooming grumble, praying to be let
into farm chores. We passed her mud-cement kitchen when the veil of
her indifference dissolved into shards of questions to accost my threats.

If you leave, where will y'all discover fresh breeze similar this in Lagos, forests
with bush paths, birds that sing you awake every morning, or the clay
you mold with? Will you be able to play in the rain, suspension palm kernel,
or roast cashew seeds for nuts? I stood frowning, gathering my defense.

She had listened to my spirited intervention, my defence of metropolis-living,
which included amongst other things, baobab buildings, metal bridges,
asbestos roofing. So that when I ended, she said—her confront formed
in a ponderous solemnness set up equally in a prayer—child, you know nix.

Kelvin Kellman writes from Lagos/Ibadan, Nigeria. He's had works featured or forthcoming in Green Briar Review, The Blueish Mountain Review, Hawaii Review, North Dakota Quarterly and elsewhere.

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