Issue 3.5

Reflection On the News of a Classmate's Passing Though born into a common time and place, we companied but little in our youth then went our separate ways; we did not try to stay in touch, nor was there reason why we should. And yet I felt today, in truth, the icy air of death upon my face.

The Far Elephants How thin the topsoil is above the sand of the hills here. How firm the dry grass holds it. With wind or rain the grass bends, hums so low that elephants two continents away hoist their ears as sails, coil their trunks and purr. Their rumbles take to the sea as ships.

Light In Tired Places The tired houses hunch, sticking up like stumps of teeth where the dark road’s slung downhill. Gold glows out of bedroom windows; the lamps’ white light shakes down across the fog. I’ve come with wetness itching in my boots, pulled one way by rest and another by beauty. I know that you will come, stepping gently like an antelope through the quiet, to take me to your gold-lit room, where tapestries hang bellied from the ceiling and blankets gather in a burrow. Take me closely now. We’ll pray into our knuckles, burning tapers in the road’s small dream. Though our worries will stay here with the mud and glow, our best intentions will flutter up on pale wings, as ash or moths.

Grace The Holy Ghost came as gold in the dim church— it grew in leaves, curling from the wall like burning paper, dropped, flowed, spread past the pews, licked around the doorframe and flew. on the street it slid beneath the feet of passersby, jumped and fell down stone facades like rain, flashed from streetlamps in disguise. Then all was quiet. A paper pamphlet clicked against a pew. A priest’s sleeve rustled. Then all was deep, and wide, and open.

My Father’s Body Is a Seed My father died when drought was our flood; it spread through the breadth of our land. The flood ate everything we had: the yams in our barns, the rice in our farms, the beans we kept away from moths and gnats, the corn we placed above our kitchen rafters, and those we stowed away in our granary; the cocoa yam my mother harvested last year, our chickens, sheep and goats. It was the flood that made us orphans even when we had won the race of eternity, and our backs stood up to the rampaging storms. It was the flood that created potholes on our bodies where the road had been smooth and full of flowers; the flood deposited the sands, piled up rubble as bodies. The desert was a river; the valley was a mountain; though flowers and trees covered our ground, there were no leaves for the nest of birds, there was no wood for feeding the fence, no offering for the sacrifice of sticks and stones. My father turned into a seed at his death that grew into a luxurious plant. The river dug up a valley in our compound, and filled it with water and nutrients. There is a rich garden of plants and trees, fishes breeding and multiplying in the pond, birds constructing nests out of thistles, rabbits hiding in holes in our kitchen rafters, and even crocodiles swimming without fear inside the pool of water in our backyard. My father’s blood irrigated our fields. Since we have overgrown our fears, we live in forgiveness for letting go of our humility, for destroying the scars of our forefathers. How often have we tried to empty the ocean, or make the impossible possible with our teeth? Must we compensate for our crimes of wealth with the bloody booty of a human sacrifice? It's as though we used our bodies to capture the wind as we gnash our clattered teeth to appease a deity.