Search Sweet Country
After Kojo Laing
We sleep in body vases.
Animal beings in paper palaces
Jamestown, Cantonment, Labone…
Stars are stuffed animals;
The sun brandishes its old teeth.
O lost country, dog country,
Rivers like mud in a kiln.
Cathedral of charcoal.
Plateaus like puse poses.
Our hugs emptied into the Atlantic.
All your vanity ends
in a barely bird
arriving from smoke
and I, It lashes.
And the baby bird, ours,
lays like a body bag
in distance.
The city weeds around it,
With its brass borders of lamplight.
And we weep a riot round it.
Its flagged shadow recedes into trees
like two adult crickets fucking.
The insects explode
like starships
in our automaton atmosphere.
The baby bird, barely bird, dies.
We fold the country into him
And then out of him,
Till he is a moonlit bite-mark.
We flail our teeth with sex,
the kind that kills
no stuffed animals.
However fucked,
However empty in its baby
court, the country is a child
feeding its stuffed animals
lipstick-drawn tits
on a map.
1619
A white craft drifts downriver between your head
— Lesle Lewis
A white craft drifts wayward between your head
And spume chalks the shore/sea/country,
Makes it a bright grey door/raft,
Tells yaanom where a country used to stand/hunt.
The white craft/calk shifts
before the medical examiner can look at the body/sea/country.
The coroner crowns himself dry land/sea/country
in the water/hunt he dreams.
He ripens our fists with arks/Ivy.
We ripen his eyes with the sun/sand/country
he came as. He gave us the sea/ship/body he had ruined,
It took 4 centuries/countries/seas to get there from Space.
Underneath the new shoreline/white face a woman bathes,
Her name: Virginia, stately/saintly, knife shaped;
Sharp on both sides,
Didn’t matter where we landed.
I share my last name with an ancient river
I was born pith pale and peeled
from artillery of purple dirt and midnight
I was torn from it
from the horn inside
these circuses
full of improvised trees.
I was stitched into sandmen bulges,
in Antoa princess’ clinched eyelids, and river-dusted.
I was gone before the wolves
became the only edible part of the sun.
Before weevils discovered the earth was only a speck
of shade. A wetness
as my new name winkles out through me
as though it were an ancient river.
***
*Photo by Yoel Winkler on Unsplash
