It is 3:46 A.M. July, 2019. This cockroach is a creature of habit, something that crawls out from the cracks right after the lights are out. Nobody sees it till it is right there, suddenly there, on that exact same spot every night. It has a look on it that tells you it is old, that it’s been waiting there for ages, waiting for something inevitable that never comes, always deferred. Its antennae, moving in a slow rhythm, sweep the air above its head.
Tupac Shakur was in Ras Al Khaimah, said Sami.
“But Tupac is dead,” said Connor.
“Astaghfirullah,” said Mayed.
“Tupac’s not dead,” said Sami. “He’s at the sheikh’s palace.” Sami had heard from his friend Nadia, whose uncle arranged security for the sheikh, that Tupac Shakur, the king of hip-hop, Mr. Thug Life himself, was on Jebel Jais.
For the three months before I left home,
my father allowed me to cut his hair—
a strange way to apologize
for all those years of being
unclose. But for those three months,
he wanted me to make him presentable.
So I did, every other Saturday afternoon,
standing behind him, as he sat shirtless
on a beige foldaway chair in the master bathroom,
above the sandy whorls of our linoleum floor,
wearing his favorite home khakis.
His usual was the Even Steven:
slick dark Caesar, with a shadow
taper close to his temples,
and above his neck.
I studied how his hair sprouted
in different grains. Especially tufts
that spooled from the birthmark
near his dome.
He chose Saturday afternoons
so we’d have enough time for shearing,
before he rose to Sunday’s pulpit and power.
But all this closeness was just
a parting present, before I left
and grew my hair iridescent; prodigal.
Now even when I’m home,
my father trims his own
hair, and fears mine.
Avoiding the touch of the one who cut
his hair before seven sermons. Including Mama Akua’s
memorial where he preached the whole message
in Akan about our funerary rites,
before giving the altar call in English:
For our people all it takes to enter
Asamando is a cupful of water
for the journey, and tended hair:
a freshly shaved head for men, and new
plaits for women. But saints, I tell you,
to enter heaven you’ll need more, you’ll need—
Dad, if you die before me, I swear
to still give you water.
But Dad, if I die before you, please
just reach into whatever earth’s below my body,
and feed that moisture to me.
Please empty your hands
of all razors, clippers, and blades
before you cup my head.
Bring instead to my pre-burial
some argan and almond oil.
Douse my skull. Take your
hands and comb my hair—
then, plait it. Surprise me, weave my hair
into something terrible. Into the flourish
you fear. Because if you don’t, I’ll know.
If I open my eyes and have nothing
to shelter my scapula and clavicles
from Asamando’s wind, I’ll know.
I know we’ll find ourselves in different
heavens. I’ve chosen the one that requires
only my groundwater, and my mess of hair.
Though we’ll find ourselves in different
heavens, I’ll be haunted by that other eternity
I lived, draped in linoleum and afternoon beige
for three months of summer Saturdays.
Kweku Abimbola is a postgraduate Zell Fellow at the University of Michigan’s Helen Zell Writers’ Program. He is of Gambian, Ghanaian, and Sierra Leonean descent. He is a finalist for the 2021 Brunel International African Poetry Prize and the second-place winner of Furious Flower’s 2020 poetry contest, and has work published and forthcoming in Shade Literary Arts, 20.35 Africa, The Common, Obsidian, SUNU Journal, and elsewhere. Kweku is presently working on his first full-length poetry manuscript, entitled Saltwater Demands a Psalm. His chapbook, Birth Elegies, is forthcoming in May 2022 with Finishing Line Press. You can find him on Twitter: @kwxkuu.
Sure, every photograph is an elegy
to what was, but this photograph—
which I’ve turned into my screensaver—
of my son, dead nearly three years,
has him suspended in mid-air
He has just jumped from a rocky outcropping
thirty feet above the shimmering water
of Lake George that flashes silver and gold.
The day itself is glittering with light
that has the feeling of being
excessive and there are (I’ve counted)
seven different shades of green
in the hemlocks and cedars and white pines
growing from the rocky soil of the island.
My son is alive in the thrill of his airborne body,
though it is quiet in the photograph,
no cheers and whoops from his friends
who are waiting at the top to jump,
no sounds of the boats idling below, or the waves
sloshing against their bobbing hulls.
I will not see him cleave the surface of the lake
and vanish with hardly a splash
and then break back into the light,
silvery water cascading from his hair and shoulders.
And I will not see him climb back up the rocks,
eager and intent on his next single-second flight.
But almost daily I give thanks
for this moment in which the past is gone
but never dead, this glimpse
of the terrible sorrow to come, but also
of something like an afterlife
in which his body, relaxed, calm, hovers
as if it’s forgotten its heaviness,
the air holding him fast, halfway between
two places at once, the good light of sky
and the ease of bright water that waits.
Robert Cording has published nine books of poems, the latest of which is Without My Asking. He has recently published a book on metaphor, poetry, and the Bible called Finding the World’s Fullness. A book of poems and prose titled In the Unwalled City, which includes the poem in this issue, is forthcoming.
For days, doubt struck as does lightning
across the span of night. Illuminated that way,
how did we cross the river? One stone,
then another. The silence between us a keyhole
through which I peeked & found you teasing
off your robe. Love? If it exists,
BY MONA KAREEM
Sitting on a green couch in what is now a bedbug-infested Brooklyn apartment, I suddenly realized that my flight to meet my family for the first time in five years was actually tonight, not tomorrow; 12:30 a.m., not 12:30 p.m. I had planned to wake up early in the morning, make two cups of coffee, and pack a small bag with the few gifts I managed to buy last minute for my siblings. I thought I had more hours to sit with my heavy feeling, which I assumed to be a mix of excitement and longing, but which was rather a combination of wariness and fear, of things going wrong, of encounters no one can prepare for.
In front of the couch, there was a round coffee table, which I circled around in panic, not sure if I could make it to JFK on time, to Kiev on time, to Tbilisi on time. For months, my sister and I had saved and borrowed so we could have this one-week reunion trip in a country we knew nothing about. A few months after my arrival in the United States, the Kuwaitis had denied my application for passport renewal, subsequently making me an asylee. My family’s attempts to get U.S. visas were repeatedly denied, so we began to make different plans. We called embassies every morning, in the United States and in Kuwait. I asked, “Do you accept a U.S. refugee travel document? How long to issue a visa?” while they asked, “Do you accept a stateless travel document? How long to issue a visa?” The mutually closest country was Georgia, a place Arabs have come to discover in the past few years, this time not as conquerors, but as refugees in transit, hoping to infiltrate Europe from her eastern side.
By JEFF McRAE
We scraped the Mississippi
mud off our old piano and father
blew his solos out the open window
and over the meadow
and mother made me strut
with her double-stops, drum sticks
Uwi verb
to go back to your residence.
One word, meaning to return,
not just anywhere, but home.
We were born here so we know how to do. This is the way you walk when you walk. An engine of engines. A glitter of glitter. At the corniche we gather by the sex to watch the constellation of earth. Force and proclivity, tingle and strip, all the whole day is before me. Also, it is not yours.
The departure of myth is something we count—a tickbox for each missing hour. Any memory not capitulated is likely to reform. It is forsaken, this tally. The formation of expatriates requires a mobile constitution, a tendency to ruminate, and general indemnity from causes. A coalition of glass bottles rolling up a hill.
By VERNITA HALL
Bottled Water Tastes Better
through a straw
because Things Go Better with Plastic.
Recyclable is the new biodegradable
because the light at the end of the tunnel
only seems brighter in a fairy tale.
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