Saturdays, Like This

By AFUA ANSONG

Praise this Saturday which permits me to wash with my hands (I detest this).
Praise my dirty clothes, the ones I leave for my grandmother who starts the cycle with cold soapy water.

Praise the rinse, the rush upstairs to the open roof. There, the clouds open as I hang and hide my American jeans from my neighbors who don’t even trust the wooden pins to work.

Praise Makola market, where the high-pitched chatter of women worn out by the heat of the day welcomes me. One by one, they bargain with a housewife who doesn’t have a cedi to spare.

Praise the adult crabs, corn dough, bag of fresh okra stuffed in her basket.

Praise the dirty road that floods my feet with biscuit wrappers. Praise the trotro only the poor will ride and the school girl squatting to eat kelewele by the road. She waves away flies.

Praise the conductor whose hands smell of coins. He tells me I am short 500 cedis, but winks at me, and settles too close beside me in the back seat of the van.

Praise the driver’s next stop, Asylum-Down. Our journey home, blocked by long lines of lorries with horns beeping in fury. Praise the cacophony, the pitiful moan of a Christmas goat.

 

Afua Ansong is a scholar and artist, currently working on a collection of poems about Adinkra symbols from Ghana, interacting with these symbols as modes of grief and artistic freedom. Her work can be seen or is forthcoming in Aquifer, Prairie Schooner, and Frontier, and on her website, afuansong.com.

[Purchase Issue 18 here.]

Saturdays, Like This

Related Posts

Hall of Mirrors

November 2023 Poetry Feature: Virginia Konchan and Gabriel Spera

GABRIEL SPERA
Gracefully we hold each other / architects and optimists / always at arm’s length like / congenital dreamers / tango masters slinkily coiled / bright candles in a hall of mirrors / whatever I propose you propose / to conquer repeating and repeating / the opposite.

a golden field of wheat

Thresher Days

OSWALDO VARGAS
The wheat wants an apology, / for taking me this long / to show my wrists / to the thresher boy. // Finally a summer where he asks how my parents are / and my jaw is ready, / stretched open so he can hear about them, / easier. // I may look different after, / I will need a new name.

People gather in protest in front of a building; a man (center) holds up a red flag

Picket Line Baby

AIDEED MEDINA
White women give my father shaded looks./ Bringing babies to do their dirty work,/ mumbled in passing. // I am paid in jelly doughnuts / for my day on the boycott. // My dad leads my baby brother / to the front of the grocery store doors / for a meeting with the manager.