Adyebo

I.

Her voice did not waver as she raised the forefinger

of her left hand and said, "My mother was taken

and then murdered before my eyes before I was thirteen.

I was sold among rebel commanders for nearly six years.

I have borne eleven children and lived through three civil wars

with both my hands still on my arms

and you will not stand in my way."

The young man pulled both lips between his teeth,

flexed his jaw, and stood to the left of a windowless steel door.

She pushed the door open. The floor was stained

with the black of old blood.

On a concrete table in the center of the room, flies

spun excitedly above a sheet that had been woven

with beige cloth but was now a supple fabric

of dripping sandstone.

Leading with her right foot, she took four steps

and pulled the sheet up by a corner and exposed

the bruised, livid feet of a tall man.

II.

His right cheekbone was pulp and the kinks of his hair

were holding his brain close to his head. The flies sprinted

on ravenous quests and they were permitted.

What more could be done?

His lips were gone and his face was split in a terrible yawn.

His ribs rose like quills or the spines of mountains through the skin

of his sides. His right knee was bent in a grotesque way, connected only

by one large ligament as if it had been torn by a medieval rack

and everywhere the blood had hardened.

His throat was cut and he had been castrated. In a grin red as a wave,

only six teeth, all molars, were visible. Hunks of his skull were missing

as if someone had been idly pulling pieces of bread from a round loaf.

One eye hung by nerves and veins but its color was impossible to discern.

"Eggplant, eggplant," she whispered, slow as the spring.

"If they have done this, why not bake him too?"

III.

She strode from the morgue. Eyes closed, she inhaled deeply

and for a moment the room was a meadow

and there were no men with uniforms

and no future years of keening the dead, and he was still

forgetting to rinse his mouth with peroxide after eating corn.

She opened her eyes and said without emotion,

"Yes, he is of my body."

She walked out of the building quickly, leaving her relatives

to show the policemen the identification card of Joseph Adyebo,

aged twenty three years, bludgeoned to his death after being found

in the bed of a rich man's son.

Fragments 5

Each morning on our doorstep, flower petals

are arrayed in prayerful patterns. We dispassionately

brush them aside as we walk (her feet soft in moccasins)

until the day's newspaper is found.

____________________________________________

tradition perishes slower than the sun

or else is extinguished in an instant,

more fragile than a firefly

_____________________________________________

A soldier walks past storefronts on pristine brick sidewalks.

He is camouflaged so that he need not see himself

unless he is alone.

____________________________________________

a prison is more than locked bars at the door

_______________________________________

one day in the world's dark heart, the Christians

burned a little girl as a witch

while the devil licked his fingers

and played the world's smooth piano keys

________________________________________

even if the only consequence of oppression

was the formation of group identity,

that alone would necessitate a march to equality

_______________________________________

even on afternoons where her song is a banshee's wail

and the windows shatter from missiles shaped as coffee cups,

I understand that whole villages would drink the dregs of death

if they could but share a minute's time with the divine

______________________________________

after three weeks of finding himself buried alive,

he began to play himself in games of chess,

and even though he was held entirely captive from light

the pieces that he moved around no board were white and black

_____________________________________

unravel (as a wave gasping at the release of the shore)

_____________________________________

What characteristic of trees first made men fell

such towering giants to the earth?

__________________________________

Goddess, tell me of chained misery,

for I know why you came from the sea

___________________________________

for an age, men knew not that oceans possessed ends

___________________________________

the sweat on her shoulders scattering

like marbles on a hardwood floor

___________________________________

a poem about a painting is not very different

than a painting about a person

___________________________________

Collapse, my love, as the grandest cliffs of granite

change to sand with the lapping of the tide,

for I have licked my fingers and rubbed the mortal source of light

into nothing. There will be no knocks against the door,

nor invaders peering into our haven. Sleep and be mine,

and when we wake the pyramids will be palm trees.

Sisyphus

I.

She told him that when she laughed her ears

turned to the color of apple peels, before stammering

that apples were sometimes yellow or green,

but that she had meant that her ears turned the color

of the peels of red apples, though perhaps that didn't matter either.

Arkady laughed and said, “Do not worry. I assure you

that there are more unpleasant ways to point out that a person is blind.”

They drank four bottles of wine and the lamps of the night faded to blue.

Her hair was the color that all things were

and the skin below her clavicle was crisp like apple peels were

sometimes. Six years passed with the dew and every star burned,

fury flooding across ancient seas that such a love was denied

to the flickering of dying candles and all the other gods.

One morning the sky was shaded like flame bitten trees

and she whispered to him as he sat clay-stained in a chair,

“You must not follow. Tomorrow morning, hanging from the mailbox

there will be a necklace. When the sun's wheel is hidden it will be gone.

Until a day comes that these two things happen differently,

you shall not see me again.”

II.

For twenty years, Arkady woke during mornings and walked

to a box he had never seen so that a chain of silver could be tarnished.

At night he wept like the roots below killing fields when his

frantic hands touched no surface save the cursed tin box-shell or walnut post.

He had stopped speaking to anyone except his village priest

until this recourse was denied him after a particularly virulent

hemorrhagic fever decimated the rural population and it was then

that hushed stories of the blind potter emerged. It was said

that he could craft wine-bowls that would disintegrate if the drinker

was a liar. It was said that he had fallen in love with a wraith. It was said

that he was an immortal who had sacrificed his first eye for the knowledge

of all things and who had later placed his second upon the altar in order to forget.

III.

It was a day in May and Arkady was forty-six years old. The path

clung to his sandals with the mud of three-day rains and he pressed the links

of the necklace to the curve of his jaw. After a moment he sat on the ground.

“Grandfather,” they said (his beard made lions surge with envy and it was

white with clay). “Grandfather, can something be done?” He sat silent.

He wrapped the necklace around his craftsman's wrist.

Arkady did not move and the next morning they said again, “Grandfather,

can something be done?” The next morning they pleaded with him (his skin sallow,

his urine dark brown and dribbling from his pants, the slim silver of her token

metallic in his mouth) to drink water from a spring, but he shook his head in reply.

On the third morning of his vigil he began to break his teeth in his madness. Before

night his heart broke entirely. They buried him in a simple coffin beneath

an apple tree high on a hill. Next to the headstone of Arkady, shaper of clay,

a monument pierced its way into the dungeons of the clouds. A bronze setting

proclaimed the name of the Tsarina Alexandra,

dead these twenty years from an outbreak of plague.

Rapping in the Snow

Cop rolls by and he’s nibbling on a sweet confection.

Streetlights flash in my eyes from every direction

And putting steel on my wrists is that pig’s obsession.

He can’t see me ‘cause the night is my soul’s protection.

I’d punch his mouth but he’s got a fucking Smith and Wesson.

That’s not all, just a taste of talent’s selection.

Son of Pan, immortal life without introspection,

Can’t talk ‘bout women since I am the picture of discretion,

But if you wonder who’s the greatest I’ll answer the question:

The bi girls say that I should give the lesbians lessons.

Cairo

Barbarous men with masks like men’s faces step heavily.
There is a peculiar tinge from the foreign sunset pooling with the dust
and it is remembered that gutters are not only for the rains.

There is terror in the air and the feet of the pursued are war drums
(pulse, pulse, the rumble of a slipping fault,
the shudder of foundation’s collapse, the suffocation
of a religious festival that sends too many to god).

They die and here it is winter. They die with ribs broken by batons
and because my toes are cold I wear socks with my slippers.

Usurpers

I.

The mirrors on their wooden hinges had been placed

with insides out. A malediction spiraled down into a drain.

Clouds from slipshod artistry mummified illusions of appearance.

Blood came in whispers from her mouth

and her tongue was a lash for the penitent

while she intoned the sacred name of Legion.

II.

A knife pared the unholy black from metal corridors of human hearts.

Great grey birds with souls like doubt circled three slow times

before believing a burned tree stump to be a throne or shrine.

Her lips parted like a crimson sea and plumes of ash and terror

made pirouettes in the sun.

The Sons of Heaven could never have been ambitious for her hand.

The air is not of earthly kingdoms, nor will it consent to be chained.

Have all the others perished in the lightning blink of hatred?

Is it instead that we have fabricated a world so like the old

that its artifice shall not be discovered until the time of dying?

Surely neither can be true. Surely the graceless pestilence of jealousy

still lies feline behind each celestial glare upon a windowpane.

Once in the dark of December’s first day I killed Aeolus

and kept his power for my own.

She laughed and serrated her teeth against my shoulder.

III.

Anna, your hair the whip of flame, the light falling

from a rainbow onto the bone on the outside of your right wrist,

a tear in the seam of your shirt placing coy shadows for my eyes,

for you I have become loathsome in the sight of the living.

Steel

There had been a time when his madness had been tolerable,

as indeed it still would be in a man possessing less power,

but now it kindled and flared and on occasions

the vambrace of his right arm flattened the faces of servants

as hobnails grind a trembling spring daisy.

Such violence, of course, was normally the product of trivial slights.

The fire dancing on the bricks was hungry without starving

and onto walls black from flames and malcontent it sent small promises.

Above the hearth in a gilt frame there was a picture of a woman,

forbidding and terrible, wrists slim as swords,

her eyebrows the tails of Apollyon’s legions,

the artist’s skill sending her full lips out like a deathly kiss

as they seemed concrete as the exhausted breath

of a lover’s panted praise.

He pressed his tongue to his gums and spat away the blood.

He chuckled. In a far corner the headless body of a man hung on hooks,

twisting like a cloud or a sunset or a soul. What had the offense been?

Perhaps a plate was elbowed with a crash onto fitted stone.

Perhaps an unwise word was whispered too loudly.

More likely that the absent eyes had wandered to the portrait,

that in the shock of awe and beauty a sigh had escaped.

More likely that this insult coiled the madman into swift motions

that culminated with blood dripping into the fissures of flooring,

that a head had grotesquely rolled until the asymmetry of the nose

brought the desecration to a languorous halt.

Perhaps such a thing would have occurred if there had been no portrait,

no armor bound with animals’ tanned hides, no crushing blows,

no slashing whispers of steel nor the dull break of bone.

Perhaps such a thing would have occurred if there had been no room or walls,

no women, no madness, no oblivion at the bottom of a brandy bottle.

Perhaps it was sufficient that there were men.