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…
Posts tagged family
Duck Blood Soup
The jar looks to be full of swamp water. Its contents swirl and leave grit on the glass when you turn it over in your hands. “Duck blood soup,” explains your mother. “Czernina.” It always…
Watching–The Fall
You slide the knife’s edge across the top of the cup, making sure there is not one speck of flour more nor less than called for in the recipe. Now you wipe the counter, clearing…
Antitheticality
When I died I had a self reminder on the back of my hand. I forget what it said now, but it was something like, Don’t forget that thing you are supposed to remember. My…
Nothing Gold Can Stay
Our sixth-grade classroom smelled of stale peanut butter and scrapped fruit wafting from the lunch pails inside our desks—those we’d crouched under in drills during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Word problems and diagrammed sentences sprawled…