By AKWE AMOSU
April’s cool Catskill forests are yet to leaf out
but the maple’s crimson flowers blush whole hillsides
deepening the dense green in the fields below.
New poems from our contributors AKWE AMOSU, JUDITH BAUMEL, and ELIZABETH METZGER
Table of Contents:
Akwe Amosu | New citizen
Judith Baumel | Irij
Elizabeth Metzger | Talking to Jean about Love
| Talking to Jean about Love II
By AKWE AMOSU
New York City
After Kenosha, Wisconsin, 26 August 2020
1. Erasure
I went to the for water,
although I had no thirst, again
unable to find Not sleeping,
roaming restless, hunting
at 2am for on my phone,
no rabbit hole too deep, however
dull, aching tired as though
I had been
Only three days into this,
asked how my was
going, I launched into a tense
that the question even
deserved and saw how hard,
again, I was trying not to the
plain fact that right in front of us,
again, the cop had emptied
his into a human,
now yet shackled
to his hospital bed. That again, a
young had taken down a human
with a military grade yet
away from the scene unhindered.
And that, again, we were being asked
to choke off thoughts, stifle
any sound, stave and belt
the chest to our agitation,
keep breathing because, again,
we
By AKWE AMOSU
When the storm’s coming, you can feel it. The atmosphere’s tense, quivering the leaves, hot, damp air close up to your face, the cloud doubling and darkening, metallic grey, sucking in the light. There’s a portent in the frenzy of birds and the cat’s retreat into the bottom of the clothes cupboard. Sometimes night falls and everything is still on edge, pending. The child loves to hear the thunder sneak up in the dark with a low growl. She counts the seconds after each cannonade. When the rain finally falls, you can’t hear much else, even when there’s shouting. She likes to climb out of bed into her window and get gooseflesh in the wind, then to jump back, shivering, under the covers to get warm. Then she does it again. Once there were hailstones, thrashing the asbestos roof. The noise obliterated everything, like a drug; she slept.
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