The Geez Read online

  at the airport: the stripping of layers,

  a life exposed to x-rays, picking up after.

  But it is also walkable miles, days

  of silence and three months before

  we will be together again. And these metrics,

  distance and time, cannot unravel the hours of

  your voice’s life in my ears, the space the warm

  earth essence of you takes up in my nostrils, why

  my body in sleep makes space for you

  even when my arms can’t cradle your flesh.

  Travelling Solo

  Coded in smiles and that buzz

  we share in the grip of one-

  of-a-kind books, paintings, songs...

  is a key we both know – one

  we build charged chords of joy from,

  transpose, dragging 7th notes across days

  twisting distortions into possibility.

  We’re on a stage and distance is the noise

  at the bar – we play harder to rise

  above it. The need to make a living

  switches tones between major&minor

  but we solo our way back to origin ♩

  it’s the way we write and don’t ♪ it’s how

  we kiss instantly or hover in hunger – pine ♪

  the way, with knowing smiles, we tangle

  like some fantasy found in the spine

  of a book, two cinnabar shades snug

  in the heart of a painting, phrases that

  overlap in a song that repeats like a love

  supreme, a love supreme ♪ it’s that

  way that you hold me ♪ the way we

  hold we ♪ the way you hold hold me

  like I’m leaving the melody, knowing

  I’m coming back, but still... but still...

  Blowing Smoke

  for the curve of dismounts

  o

  She lifts her head to gift the stars white

  smoke and my lips are drawn to the floral

  arch of her neck, inching higher, the swirl

  her fragrant exhalations make becoming night:

  breath to air, dust to dust – we are mortals

  drenched in a hummingbird sensation of time.

  oo

  I have known moments like this; my naked torso

  brown as the bark of the mango tree I’ve mounted,

  its leaves camouflage while I watch my playmates

  seeking me, excitement choking me the same way

  her moving fingers make my breath hover. She catches

  me in the corner of her eye, my lips tremble on her

  skin before the giggle becomes sound: lightning to thunder.

  ooo

  Sometimes I was found: some girl or boy throwing stones,

  breaking the amnios of leaves that protected me – but most

  times I just got tired of waiting and shimmied down. Love

  is a little like that; the playmates plentiful as pollen grains

  yet only a few bursting beyond the red bubble of lust

  to the heart, the after-giggle, where the smoke rings go.

  How I Know

  “I smile a little more than I did before...

  That’s how I know love.” – The RH Factor

  Some memory of darkness; soft expanses

  of ebony – and flesh that turned liquid

  on my tongue, in the clasp of infant gums.

  A body that moved to soothe me, a body

  with shoulders angled to support leaning.

  Notes hidden like silverfish in the creases

  of my books, six-year-old fingers turning

  care-perfect Ds, surprise declarations that drop

  out on stages, reminding me that I’ve birthed

  a girl with heart, a child who knows healing.

  The smell of almond and Shea butter in the hair

  of an embrace, the sound of trains passing, a glut

  of air as tunnels fill with weight, slow breath

  as I try to hold a moment that feels like one

  that shouldn’t pass. We’re skin to skin at the cheek.

  A boy’s smile that emerges as his mother’s

  door closes, his hands reaching for the learned angle

  of my shoulders, the circumference of my neck

  soon in the clasp of his thighs, monkey bar antics

  fading as a girl warms my cheek with her small hand.

  This is how my dad felt, perhaps. All I remember is fleeting

  but I recall the scratch of a pin on shellac, the wound

  of Mahalia’s voice rising to fill a house, the weight

  of his arm around my neck, the whisper of a smile

  moving the wood of his skin, his voice saying, Listen.

  In the poetry section of a bookshop, my hand in the crease

  of an anthology of Brazilian poets, lost in the black joy

  of word after apt word, I lift my eyes and see the woman

  who said yes to dinner. She moves and my mouth is wide:

  between us, a field of teeth straining to do more than just smile.

  Of Sides

  Love for you is

  what you have

  witnessed: doing

  something you hate,

  proof of sacrifice.

  Love weighed in debts:

  a chorus of chores.

  Love for me is what

  I know: loving

  whatever i’m doing

  because it is done

  for love, done with

  song, skip in the heart,

  the task forgotten.

  Every day you smile

  less; my smile becomes

  wider. To onlookers it seems

  I am consuming you.

  I am the one who is

  wronged, but love is

  a cushion of many sides.

  Locking Doors

  (for Teacher & the Sundance Kid)

  To free the L from its metal perch, slide

  the torpedo of its head into place, locking

  the front door – to check the fires of the gas

  stove do not still burn... He remembers it’s night

  and darkness brings duties. He holds your hand

  guides you to the bathroom, turns on the light,

  turns away before you turn on him, as you do

  sometimes when the cache of your memories reset

  making him a stranger. He can recall Grand National

  winners’ names for the last twenty-five years: Don’t

  Push It, Royal Athlete, Earth Summit, Comply or Die

  … reels them off in his head, while you slip into Igbo,

  speaking to the Canadian neighbours who share your South

  Eastern patch of London with you. Falling back gently,

  the way your Romanian gymnastics teacher taught you

  in Lagos all those years ago. And this is the beauty

  he holds on to; how you can recite his parents’ phone number

  as though some magic has unlocked the forgotten idyll

  of your unsettled Apapa youth. You still remember him

  as the boy with a parting trimmed semi-permanently

  into his hair by a father he saw when the ships came,

  who brought you akara so hot he juggled it all the way

  to your house, smiling as he told you he was the one

  who got the first ones from the pan, first in the queue. He is

  no longer the man who almost gambled your lives away, who

  near lost his mind when your twin boys died

  at fifteen: no,

  he is again the boy

  who kissed you and ran towards sunset,

  looking back every fifteen metres to see if you were smiling too.

  Year AD87: BM14

  a poem in three sentences

  Before the memory of spit wiped from your brow

  in silence, before a boy in blue in Manchester
/>
  threatens to put you in the van simply for asking

  what is our crime? before the grainy 1991 birth

  of raised batons caught on camera raining on Rodney,

  before Joy Gardner, Roger Sylvester, Erica Garner,

  Sandra Bland, Sean Rigg, Cynthia Jarrett turned breathless

  under a white haze of hatred, when you only blazed

  in protest when you were tackled to the ground playing

  football in a swirl of dirt, cheers and jeers raining

  from the edges of a rectangle in Accra. / Blue-tinged

  days when you were newly teen and only beginning

  to edge towards the van of the hormone-driven youth

  movement, before you know the damaging disorientation

  of a kiss on the collarbone, a nip beneath the breastbone,

  had you been taken to the side one fine Saturday

  (after you’d wiped the chequered vinyl floors of your home

  on hands and knees, laughed with your siblings

  while coaxing the gleam from your parents’s cream Volvo

  and had your cold water shower while whistling Whitney’s

  new song, I Wanna Dance with Somebody), given lemonade

  – pale green and fresh – and told that you would know love

  many times over, that your heart would stretch, sing and shatter,

  that you would learn the suck and spit of spent bodies,

  that you would break and bloom, and break and bloom,

  but through the mill of that mix of ache and injustice

  in the world, you would find yourself a father of three

  and friend of a clutch of formidable women you know

  so intimately that you could take breaths for them,

  you would have jumped up and screamed No way!

  spilling the lemonade onto dirt like a libation,

  your joy too much to contain at such possibility.//

  This is how, come Saturday, when you pick your kids

  up, you are always so stunned, because who would believe the tooli that

  in a world that showers so much terror on skin so dark

  you could still make, out of one lemonade-drinking boy so blue,

  a full-muscled girl, a wise-cracking boy and a wide-grinning girl? ///

  A Concise Geography of Heartbreak

  HUMAN

  ...it starts from the skin, the same way

  Europeans came from the shore, smiling,

  setting up trading posts. When they whisper

  in your ears, nibble on your lobes, sending

  a shiver running through you, that’s Stanley

  pretending to be an explorer, but under contract

  to King Leopold. A finger runs down

  your chest, raising goosebumps, your lips

  lock and your oil reserves run free.

  ENVIRONMENTAL

  You are learning

  a new language, every limb of your body

  possessed by the fire of this love that smelts

  gold, aluminium, copper, tin and iron ore. You run

  when they ask,

  doing do-for-love things, making their lives

  easier. Meanwhile, they are with friends planning

  how to deceive you, use you – it’s the Berlin Conference

  in kisses. They are all up inside you,

  you are in your feelings, sappy

  as sliced rubber trees.

  PHYSICAL

  You want to drop seeds and shit,

  hell, maybe you do – one or two –

  until some night, the forest fires start.

  It’s like the worst kind of heartburn –

  all that BS you’ve swallowed.

  You start an independence movement,

  define limits, draw borders. They come pleading,

  they offer enticements, Ambassadors

  make compelling cases, seeding tears

  in your eyes. But once you have seen

  their true purpose, you can’t unsee it: you must

  save your heart – even if it means you will hurt,

  even if the new country your carve is

  an assembly of broken things. It is yours.

  You will compose an anthem

  and sing it like an orgasm. You will

  sew a flag from fragments of new insight,

  fly it as high as you hold your head.

  Underbelly

  You are seven, her eyes are molten,

  her chin weighs what your thinking

  weighs on the heels of your palms,

  your fingers are feathers along the lines

  of her cheekbones. She is about to kiss

  you, but a gaggle of friends come in

  and she spits in your face instead.

  You will remember that moment when

  you are twenty-eight and you trace

  the point when a lover you meant to marry

  turned sour on you, to an evening out

  with her girlfriends discussing the lure

  of unpredictable men. Suddenly she’s asking

  about circumcision – a new interest in dicks.

  The twenty-one year gap in betrayals

  hasn’t changed you. Your boys don’t understand,

  neither can the ex’s friend who sleeps with you

  now: how can you be so calm – happy even?

  But your thoughts are feather-light with little

  memories: the euphoric pull of dark eyes, loving

  moments together, away from the baying crowds.

  lenguaje

  Whisper to me in the language I know

  when I know no language, when my face

  still bears the map of sleep, the clear trace

  of fatigue passing, mute and steady as breath.

  Call out at the hour when I am uncertain

  whether the sky’s clustered darkness threatens

  rainfall or signals night fading away.

  Coax my protest muscle from my mouth’s shell,

  coat my lips with a fine dew of argument

  and place your morning plea beyond barriers

  of translation. Let tongue touch tongue, test,

  and by degrees reach fluency in the lingua

  that calls forth the earth’s children, conjures flesh

  from lust. I entreat you with love – in Ga.

  Kɛ i’tsui aka shwɛ

  “You see, I could conceive death,

  but I could not conceive betrayal.” – Malcolm X

  Ojotswalɔ, my heart burns for you

  like kpakpo shitɔ spreading jealous

  green in the ripeness of my heart –

  add not salt to my pain;

  kɛ i’sui aka shwɛ. Do not

  bury my passions in ŋmlitsa – hard,

  formless and scorching in the sun

  for I have loved you too much

  to merit such disdain.

  Kai’mɔ fɔfɔi ni n’kɛ ba o’shia,

  smiles we shared over ngai’s spat crackle

  the songs we sang together, voices

  as warm as water in a gbudugbaŋ,

  already past language,

  violating taboos as we shared kɔmi

  kɛ shitɔ with maŋ –

  kai mɔ mi nakai’o

  kai mɔ mi nakai.

  Kɛ i’tsui aka shwɛ. Do not

  linger in the wind of our union

  like a basket

  of didɛ shala;

  kaa ha ni e’tɔmi

  tamɔ wolɛɛnyo yɛ hunu mli.

  Ofainɛ kɛ obaa shi mi’ɛ yaa.

  Kɛ i’tsui aka shwɛ;

  don’t keep leaving and coming back

  like a gbogbalo, doing a dance I do not

  understand, for I love you

  too much to learn

  to love you again.

  Dark Spirits

  Home half drunk but with some degree

  of faculty left you find your exes nak
ed

  in bed with the woman you're seeing now She's her

  best journalist self soft lamplight lapping her

  skin's contours as she turns from the lawyer to ask

  the anthropologist about shame in cultures that cleave

  tight to commensality The sculptor is studying the clay

  of her own nipples her calves resting on the microbiologist's

  thighs They pay you no mind not even the blues

  singer who said she would die for you not even

  when you strip and perform that ridiculous party trick

  with your dick no hands as you make the little thing

  dance left to right that the novelist adores You

  sulk as the debate shifts to patriarchy voices

  rising as they coax and challenge leer and laugh

  resonant as they agree on your status as a sincere

  but flawed feminist a sympathiser they say

  The chemistry lecturer spots you eventually

  points The Kahlo scholar ignites a fire right

  in the middle of the bed and their fingers like

  a hundred licking flames beckon you You feel

  the heat of the equator as you lean back mattress

  buckles the red of the fire pulling your locks

  making you scream Before your fantasies can come

  alive they turn to envelop you like caterpillars on

  sweet fruit you disappear in the amber of their fusion

  When morning comes your room is rich suffused

  with the burn and treacly aftertaste of dark dark spirits

  Eaux

  Oscura y sus obras

  i

  Three primary colours mixed

  in a shallow pot. A blackness

  beyond the reach of a scorpion’s sting.

  I am yet to meet the being

  who can unmix paint, restore

  the pure pigment the brush’s tongue flicked.

  ii

  For venom’s cure comes from venom,

  from fangs jibbed like a fountain pen’s nib,

  is collected in a hollow, injected by hydraulics.

  I say I am a dreamer who fills spaces

  with wild doodlings; I place diamonds

  in the charcoal of sketches, laughter

  in bursts of gloom, but God! Who knew

  the power that children have

  to expand air, to set a ship adrift?

  iii

  A brush might ask its bearer: which is