Prose, Poetry, and Art since 1956
You fly 4 hours to your mother’s province whereat lunch, your family listens to the chismis of the barrio while you speak to the itlog and the bagoong and last night’s rice,to the bangus on your plate that your mom debones for you,your fingers, too American to distinguish the bone from the meatthat you will dip in the sawsawan, communing at the center of your plate.Your hand-me-down tongue converses fluently with every note of sour,…
for Wọgọwanyị Great-grandmother was a woman sold twice, ransomed twice from slavers on the way to Calabar or Bonny dispossessed widow at the mercy of the world In duty she was bound twice— first, by marriage to a man who died young, then by the noose of gratitude and levirate traditions to the man who ransomed her No, thrice was she bound for between Man…
After the leaves fell over the courtyard, I saw you coming. Potholes heavy with bouncing sparrows became heart-throb. Every butterfly whirring, every puppy pulling skeins of tossed cloth was a blessing. Near hoarfrost I stared at your photograph; my lips kissed the masculine air. On my patio of dead roses, through stunned sky, beyond detonated stars, through your tutelary angels, from a world outside myself, you came toward me. No…
My dead brother-in-law is inside our old toy rocking horse. Recently, we watched that Netflix documentary—you know, the one about dying, ghosts, reincarnation, etc. What I’m saying is that I literally believe my dead brother-in-law took residency in a discarded Fisher Price plastic horse in the backyard. It is the exact sort of thing he would do. Three months ago, he climbed the Maroon Bells,…
Twelve and my breasts begin their slow swell, moon-bright in the seventh month of my slumber. This strange sheen, as within the begonia’s waxy heart, my neck spreading its blush when, in front of my crush, the boy from Glasgow County, B snaps my training bra and runs away, laughing. In Home-Ec two years later, while the class learns how to use measuring cups, D…