one my father bought but didn’t get to drink,
kept for me by a well-meaning aunt. And how
hard my throat shrank with every sip, how sharp
that smooth black liquid felt inside me, how hard
these nights that blacken me, broken with grief
for a man I loved who can no longer grieve.
Hangman
Out of the benign madness of our homes, we are
players of a different ilk, dreamers with no respect
for height, for flight, for the choke-hold of night.
Round midnight, and the faded lip of the rim still
gleams from the desperate reach of a weak street lamp,
like a vaselined smile beckoning in the corner of a club.
We shoot our shots and indulge in wordplay, lines
drafted onto paper each time a letter is called out –
after the basketball, nerveless despite its perpetual goosebumps,
kisses the hoop and slides in. Our Hangman is different.
We have sheaves of thick blank paper and pencils in three grades.
We’re all artists: when we guess a wrong letter we draw curves
instead of lines and, because we like to fly, birds are
our thing. We call our game Wingman. As we play, feathers
emerge carrying streamlined bodies, the arcs of our three-pointers
truer with each attempt. We quote Rakim lines as the purest
form of trash talk, holding both pencil and ball like a grudge
although we’re drawing the same bird: whether we end up
with an eagle or a crow, we know there is no noose,
no pain, just the net and our dreams – nobody dies
even if one soars.
Ballade for Wested Girls Who Want the Rainbow
Wested girl, your city has taught you to hate
the kind of men you fall for, Pictures of them
flash on local news cycles every night
when newsreaders’ lips are twisted by crime
into shapes never full glass but coloured stem.
Pale news tongues never mention the melting of Shea
butter in dark male hands, fingers in grandmothers’ hair,
the posters of Paddington Bear that they haven’t
removed from their walls since the age of seven,
how they hum love songs off-key, the nails they bite
when nervous. They’ve debated the shots of Sembene
Ousmane & Kurosawa, read the words of Giovanni & Auden,
played around with fistfuls of chopped coriander
to render simple meals great, but the papers
won’t mention those things: those travel headlines you get
that label boys as men and men as boys and
boys as scourges, mark them out as threats
by sly leans of language. You know that’s truth bent,
you’ve seen these men’s tears, but come crunch time
you still see what you’ve been taught, what you desire:
their bodies – those vessels with shades of darker
for skin – with muscle, with muscle, with muscle within;
with muscle, with muscle, with muscle and sin...
and you forget the epicardium, its sublayers,
the spaces it cradles within, its pockets of fear.
Of Serendipity
Cybernetic serendipity was a phrase invented
for me by my father – an easy source
of laughs when a child can’t shape his
soft Cs or Rs properly, but a priceless gift
for his vocabulary. Later, he would explain
gyroscopes as objects with a steady core,
their orientation maintained with the help
of outer gimbals that spin. I never asked
what happens if gimbals break, if
a heart’s constant tread is unbalanced
by a break in the body that holds it;
what happens when serendipity dictates
that cancer is a hammer that knocks
gimbals out of shape? What I know
is: I was out delivering newspapers;
the weather was icy as death; I felt
my father depart at the traffic light;
I raised my handlebars and tried
to force my way through the red to my own
demise; horns blared like a final chorus
but my unbroken gyroscope stayed true.
Trumpet
The first time you blow
a tight-lipped buzz into the funnel
of a silvered mouthpiece, you understand
Charles’s Law – the one on held pressure
not Mingus’s well-thumbed message
of exact timing – that tells us all we need
to know about temperature and what volume
it moves. If it’s hot, it’s straight up
physics: volume is maximal. You knew,
but now you really know the fire
it takes to set that horn alight,
spark music along its burnished length,
the molten brass opening out
to spew
a resonant shaft
of burnished, burning air.
One Night We Hold
for Ms Bones
One night we hold and the lights go
out. Everything in the world turns peripheral
vision. We lose ourselves in the dark edges
that pattern the wings of some bright butterfly flitting
between your skin and mine. We let go of logic,
history; we believe we are beyond the grasp of gravity
floating as we are in these sensations we kiss
with. Time, family and friends swim
outside the urgency of our hunger. We believe
in the everlasting of love, never stopping
to wonder where we might drop anchor. We abandon
reality’s compass at the border of our lips. All we know
now is the spin of intoxication, a cocktail of sighs pitched
into a cauldron of dancing flames. We carry our own light
birthed, like campfires, from friction;
two bodies moved by hands to the melting point of Sodium.
We are salt separating into its elements, we are Lot’s nameless
wife reclaiming our story. If nobody else looked back
everything is a rumour. We are sweat without words;
how it feels is a held breath. Tomorrow’s story sits in
the depth of our eyes, limpid as lakes reflecting night.
Eros
Bottle
I think of the room, the way
it separated into definite things
in new light. the sparse spread
of furniture; the writing table
a chequerboard of thought, schemes,
the bed no longer neat,
and beside
it, shiny glasses, unused, a bottle empty
of rum, on my tongue the dance of her
sweat and the sugarcane’s trapped burn
stripped
from every limb her body possesses.
A story –
some old pub nugget of Ethiopian women
and their skill at splitting chickens
into twelve parts, with no need for knives,
just a tender feel for the limits of flesh,
the fear it must inspire in stray husbands –
comes to mind
when I imagine her body
that morning: the hunger that tensed my being
how I was afraid to tell her I might be
in love with her,
terrified
of seeding hopes
I could not suckle,
the salt-charged taste of her,
rum
that smoulders still
in the back of my throat.
break/able
Last night we left the blinds half/open, so
the sun would wake us. The train you must catch
more important than our week/long jive
with the natural order of things. This is how it comes
to be
