Ballad of St. Lazzar
this is how you teach us to live:
drinking from the pump by St. Francis & Joseph,
picking mango and seagrapes on Poitier Ave,
washing weself in the old gully in the bush…
Category: SHORTLISTED
The Price of a Full Gele
I listened to the muffled urgency behind that thin door. I didn’t yet understand the geography of poverty: how in a single room, the distance between the birthing mat and the coffin is no wider than a heartbeat;
Three poetic studies from “A Count”
the past
remained just as it had been
nailed fast
to the special moorings
of the future
Primordial Soup
Amid the great inconvenience of it all, it was impossible to tell if this event was supposed to be a curse or tragedy or what. There was nothing to make head or tail of. All that remained was a shimmering expanse of organic compounds, the looming dread of Kingston city morning traffic and the fact that they were now running behind if they wanted to beat the long line to get inside.
Anansi Bruk it Up: An Epic
His belly full of cosmos, fat balls hanging thick, vibrating with the big clit energy lodged in the base of his hairy spider dick. Griped with the need to part the thighs of others, the will to power…
Continuity
A kind of arrogance to think you should be remembered in the first place. Most people who ever been on this planet lived and was folded back into the ground, and the world move right on without needing a name. You cant expect eternity. The future never owe us nothin.
On Becoming a Storm: Three Poems After Melissa
Something else inside her
Spins in the other direction
She tears open the pulpit and
Places her hands against both columns
Rocks the sanctuary to each side
Pulls the roof down and covers
Serpents, sinners and saints alike
Before moving to another place
Where perhaps she will be forgiven
Where perhaps she will find a home
NOTHING MOVES IN STRAIGHT LINES
This is an essay about spirals and the shape migration takes when you look at it honestly. It is about how Haitian Spiralism taught me to read my own Nigerian displacement and about how you can study a philosophy that emerged from a context completely different from yours and still find yourself reflected in its waters, still hear your own heartbeat in its drums.
Brackish
I would have loved other names, but my parents chose to name me Kael; Kael Prospere in full. I am writing this from a shipping container in Rotterdam, six thousand miles from the place I was born. The container has been converted into housing. They call it “transitional accommodation.”
Through Babylon and Other Poems
That year a violence made the ocean
surge and spoon the humans out the shallow
ground of a churchyard, the hurricane in question
spreading our dead among the miscellany,
banana leaves and zinc, a broken galore left
on the roads like crepe paper after parade.
The Education of Marlene Joseph
A typical day is the twenty-minute walk to school because the money she saves on transport is money she can put toward the chalk she buys herself because the ministry allocation ran out in October. A typical day is thirty-eight children in a room built for twenty-five, and the heat, and Widline in the front row who is ten and reads at a level that would embarrass children in Lyon, who reads with her whole body tilted toward the page as if leaning into a wind.
Piece of Sea
As the nighttime sighed, Mr. and Mrs. Caridad drifted into the same dream.
They lay face down on the ocean, floating along its silky surface, naked, and draped in moonlight’s velvety glow. The water was red, and it was white, and it was blue, all at the same time. Schools of silver-scaled fish, sparkling like jewels, swam eagerly into the open hands of the couple. Each fish multiplied, over and over, until the red-white-blue ocean was nothing but silver flesh and scale.
