Current Issue
for Ian Chinaka Strachan
shattered like glass—
shattered like a windshield
when a car crashes…
a back that has been lashed,
a woman who has been whipped for 17 days—
at times, several times a day…
come old age,
when/by then,
we are all patched up…
patched so many times,
in so many places,
in so many ways…
like an old tube in an old tire,
punctured so many times—
when the poem is edited and polished and fine-tuned,
it will be running and you won’t even hear it
we edit until all the hiccups and other noises
I measure out my life in weeks,
week-after-week,
weaker and weaker
as the weeks go by,
as they accumulate
like massive bricks of time
until time and I crumble, tumble down
An ailing man weeps in the October sky.
I am somewhere else, again.
The world is not an open field.
Autumn quickly broke
down to mud,
a low European country
Césaire warned
Antilleans of.
A Poem from the Archives:
Vol. 19, No. 74, Page 77 (December 1992)
“ ... this further shore of Africa”
Youth is a winged thing
meant for flight.
The map of its territories
the worlds it will conquer
lurk in the depths of its eyes.
The pull of the air
the ocean
sings in its being
for Simone
Momma’s dancing today
between two hospital rooms.
In one, her daughter
the other, her son—
dual chambers of her heart.
She’s shuckin and jivin
to make her children merry.
Like the ocean trying to
reclaim island, the fog
with the dense un-vision
of days at sea, makes each
A source of attraction, found
in the rocky archives of a seabed
off the Somers Isles amidst
volcanoes doused by the rise
I want to paint like Richter, pull all the tangled
gestures of paint marks into a mounded surface
like tidying a beach. Tug sea weedy strokes into
a united mass of colour and nuance and stature.
When a mood shifts quickly,
happens swiftly like when
your car signals you need
a change of oil. The feeling
like warm swampy lava
lights in a bar in North Devon
where an embryo swirls
Dylan Thomas’ teeth, crooked
as time-deepened gravestones,
lean over into each other,
sometimes touch at the top.
One thinks of his tilted
words, the sun-drowned
way they travel air. Gush
guttural tones of inflection,
Dear Daddy,
I am a mother, now,
to a little girl I wish you could meet.
She is day to my night:
We’ve had two years of dread.
What started as a distant threat
landed on us casual nonchalants
with blunt force.
Daddy, we shake our heads,
bewildered by death tallies,
battling shadows unfurling around
The world turned grey,
the pigeons withdrew
their morning quarrels.
The wild parrots
When was it that I
lost her
A small child finding
her mother
sobbing
Her words
the leafless trees
unburdened by sheer ferocity,
churning breath of the storm
gone now,
with only a solemn drip