My brother existed first in the loud prayers of my mother before he was born. Prayers like Lord if you give me this son I am asking for, I will worship you for the rest of my life. I will dedicate him back to you, use him for your glory. Show yourself, Father, let people know that I serve a living God. It happened that my parents counted me Chinonso, as their first bundle of joy. My younger sister Chisomaga, a second bundle of joy, and my youngest sister Chimuanya, the third bundle of joy. Still, three of us are incomplete bundles of joy because we are girls. Daddy came to the conclusion that it must be his portion in the land of the living to bear a son that will hopefully bear more sons who will carry on his surname for all eternity.…
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At a sandwich shop in San Francisco
I asked to be called Travis.
I walked by the Natural History Museum
where a cave of Neolithic men
were learning to play the spoons
for all the hairy babes preening fistfuls of knotted hair.
A bear of smoke crawls over their backs,
shaped like the Rottweiler outside my window in the morning.
Police sirens float over, and he harmonizes.
ah-roo-roo-roo
but low
as if he wants me
to
hear
them
too
– Andrew Gibson…
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April raindrops tap on the tin roof as if a giant is standing outside pouring a bag of rice onto the bus. Doc only vaguely hears them over the rumbling engine, but he can see as they slide down the thin horizontal windows across the aisle. After today, his life will never be the same. But that’s not why he’s here, so he makes a point not to dwell on it.
Conversations hum in a quiet monotone, mixing with the rattling of chains and scraping of metal on metal. A couple voices, however, have distinguished themselves above the murmuring over the past six hours, one of which belongs to a man in a cage near the front who boasts of the two people he shot and killed.…
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Old calico with gummy kidneys and knotted joints,
fur no longer smoothable, like a carpet that someone
spilled paint on, never the same. The vet tech inserted
the port in one leg, and she meowed her last protest.
I thought of my mother, who as she aged closer
and closer to her final, feeble 93, said, “We treat
our old dogs and cats better than we treat ourselves
at the end.” I held Madeline, named wittily, I thought,
given a cat’s propensity for sleep, for Keats’s young woman
who dreams of her lover. When the tech started the pink drip,
Miss M looked in my eyes, knowing; I like to think
it was a look of thanks. The tech asked if I wanted time
alone with her, but I didn’t want to feel her warmth
ebb away; instead, I imagined her waking somewhere,
running off with her young and supple tom.…
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Dawn’s heart beat for the first time in nearly a decade. Why am I here? She takes in the expressions of surprise on the nurse’s face. The woman hurriedly pages the doctor. The patient feels enormous pain when lifting her hand to touch her face. It takes an effort. She feels gauze surrounding her face. She remembers that day. She hears the laughter and shouts and views the feet of rage which stomps her face.
It began uneventfully and a nudge from a friend turned into senseless violence. She tried to ward off the blows but there were too many of them. She struck two girls and one ripped out her braids before she fell. Their furious faces, especially the one she thought was her friend and believed had her back.…
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When we discovered oil in our backyard
bubbling beneath a suspicious strawberry that produced
fruits redolent of racetracks and truck stops
the nice man from ExxonMobil who showed up unannounced
assured us our financial worries had ended
and the fun could begin
Handing us a handsome business card
he promised to retire our mortgage
provide a substantial monthly stipend
and gift us an immodest bonus check
in exchange for the exclusive right to install a bobbing derrick in the garden
where the tomato vines normally flourished
Agreeing to this felicitous arrangement would not only benefit our banking
he assured us
but additionally
and this was the really neat aspect of the deal
we’d be doing our small part to guarantee America’s energy independence
from foreigners who hate our freedom
Explaining your great good luck to someone who doesn’t have it
can be tricky
so we told him
it sounded wonderful and very generous and we’d really like to help
win whichever of our nation’s ongoing wars was most important
but unbelievably
providentially we like to think
just last week
the wife and I discovered a vein of gold while digging in the potato patch
and after praying on it and paying off some bills
we’d made a pact with our Lord and Savior
to convert the excavation site into
a community swimming pool
– MK PUNKY
Note: This poem is excerpted from MK’s collection The Year of When: 365 Poems Beginning with the Same Word.…
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One day, a small tiger mosquito crawled onto my mother’s skin, possibly from the bully bay, the muhly grass, or just dropped in from the night sky and pierced her, taking her blood in tiny droplets and exchanging it for Yellow Fever.
It’s said that the fever started in East Africa somewhere and passed from land to sea, sea to land, person to person. Eventually, one mosquito in a long lineage of short-lived ancestry reached St. Augustine, Florida, and passed on this small dark gift to my mother.
March 26, 1929
The Florida sun pulled itself over the horizon and caromed off the gaps in the wind-bounced palm fronds in the front yard. I can’t remember the last time I spent all night out. I put one hand on the doorframe and the culmination of the night’s adventures peeled tocsin through the front of my head to the back of my ears.…
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