Gloria Kiconco, Uganda
HONOURABLE MENTION
The year opens with a triumph of dying palm leaves planted in concrete along every block of our major city streets to guide foreign dignitaries to the Non-Aligned Movement meeting in Munyonyo.
A Sudanese artist crochets cotton eyes in Kampala that portal you to Khartoum. Looking deep into them you can smell burning tires and the dust of blasted cement.
When the Kenyans raid their parliament and carry out ministers’ chairs, we cheer from our own backless seats, spines crinkling in an effort to keep our heads upright.
Our own anti-corruption protest trills as brief and flat as the whine of a vuvuzela in a tightly woven net of traffic, restraining pedestrians in the middle of the highway as they surge to the stadium.
In this city I’ve left my body. Picked myself up by the scruff of my neck and placed myself gently aside, gently outside of the moment.
Being in two places at once is no trick. I’ve flicked on the auto pilot, left my phone, calendar and alarm clock to commandeer my vessel. They raise my pirate flag, a skull emoji grinning to the whipping wind.
I am far away, tucked deep into my inner pockets where the grifter or pickpocket can’t reach without raising alarm. It’s the only sabbatical I can afford, a crab living in a soda can, rattling my shiny ass down the beach.
I need to walk to loosen my racing thoughts, let them run themselves ragged. I pad around the street with the stray dogs and lope around the intersections, nosing through the neighborhood for what’s new.
On Hanlon Road, a shiny black Landcruiser, ‘big man’s ride’, swerves to miss the just-as-big and black cow trotting across the street for the brilliant grass, greener on the other side and overgrown to hide the plastic bags and bottles.
The same plastic bottles bob in the wetland hemming the lake. They rise on the low waves to mimic the swag of the black and white kingfishers that rule that narrow grove of tranquility.
So far, it’s me and my cat, curled against each other in the refuge of sleep, that know how we chased after the day, as it gurgled like a headless chicken, spitting blood in its defiant run before it collapsed and spilled the red end of itself.
If a podcast is the digital rain to rock me to sleep, the torrent of hail and thunder and lightning is the freakish reality that wakes me in the night, where between sleep and dream and waking and knowing, the dark is a dealer serving hand after hand of nightmares. The house wins again.
We are the emergency, the wound and the trauma ward nurse stitching us into sense while blinking back sleep on another late-night shift.
My fingers, tendons, biceps are translucent with aches. I keep folding zines, little books, love letters to a disappearing people. A galaxy of stars exploding upon themselves from Kivu to Rafah.
Where once I was a speck of light, a clue of love in the charcoal night, I am now a flake of falling ash, landing on the scorched earth after the not so surgical strike that dismembers a people, guts them like fish and leaves them gaping and gasping for their last breath.
I don’t run and I don’t marathon, even with the rabid dog days nipping at the tender meeting of my shank, round and rump. Fatigue is the ill-fitting prosthetic I slip into when they’ve torn away my joint.
I have to repurpose my cup, now that it’s run dry, because to discard it would be another grievance against an embattled and rasping earth.
For all the funerals we’ve frequented, emptiness should be our shroud, spun from grief and her friends. But there is a way to ward off surrender. Waive its white flag so that it draws near, ever closer with its sharpened horns. Close call after close call. On its last pass, slip a sword through the base of its neck and watch it’s two-ton form fold.
The only violence I will enact is against the apathy at my heart’s door and the paralysis that poison-creeps through the darkness of its valves.
