April 2014 | back-issues, poetry
The air has split
open, and
the townspeople
are dropping
in heaps.
They’re falling
asleep:
belly-down
on swings,
splayed on
the sun-specked
riverbank,
hunched over
on park benches.
Snores push
upwind, around
the brick
outhouse, onto
the streets. No
one’s awake to
notice.
Outside a house, sixteen tiny flags still line the front lawn,
leaning in the wind like sixteen tiny matadors
swaying, not stepping, on beat.
Inside, a baby sits before a silent television,
crumpling a newspaper in her fists just for the sound.
From afar, the town is a nova crackling,
almost vanishing, reappearing, on the horizon.
—Mia Hood
Mia Hood is a doctoral student and graduate instructor at Teachers College, Columbia University and Assistant Professor of Practice at Relay Graduate School of Education. She teaches teachers. Previously, she taught middle school students how to read better and write better. She keeps a blog called Dinosaur Sweaters.
April 2014 | back-issues, poetry
N’Djamena, Meaning ‘We Will Rest’
The day the looters broke into our house was the shot fired
as my father yelled and the fear that came with it, the window
darkened by the men looking in and the scuffing of sandals on
a packed-dirt yard, the grind of metal loosened, the voices
between walls, the bullet that never came, and the hack job that
never was by a drunken soldier wielding a machete under-
oiled and over-used on thickets by roads and rows of bodies.
I waited for an execution like at my friend’s house two years
before when a rebel was found hiding and forced to kneel,
a bullet to his brain. I waited against the wall seeking flatness,
transparency, hoping the shadows never recede. This was the end
of going to bed with no thought of fear, the beginning of chilled
sweats, the beginning of sounds signaling the departure of a place
once known—the sound of curtains riding wind, ceiling fans beating
air, the sound of opened bags and belongings strewn across the floor,
of receding taillights and a street littered with empty shells.
Origins
Sky dark when she goes to work
and dark when she returns, Fatima
picks her kids up from school
and picks her groceries up late
and picks herself up when the length
of day wears her. Her boys make faces
and talk with strangers, and they don’t know
the face of their father or fathers,
knowing only to eat, sleep, wake
the bus will get you soon,
come in the dinner gets cold,
don’t play ball in jeans on wet grass—
the stain will not come out. It’s all right,
it’s all right, she still sings at night,
folding laundry to the tune of a Bantu-
laced language and hoping that her children
will hear her as they sleep and wake up
speaking anything but English.
Twin
He had invited me over for coffee, and so we sat
sipping clear glasses—the way he always made it
syrup-sweet, sludge-thick so that it burns the throat.
We sat in his one-room mud house, on a flowered rug
shuttled across oceans and deserts to reach us
on the Saharan edge, windswept and forgotten.
I watched him heat coals in a brazier, place them
in an iron and hover his hand over its surface,
judge it ready to press fresh clothes.
I watched as he spread his shirt across the rug,
brush it with heat until it lost its wrinkles,
then fold it with a hand, his only good hand,
which had survived a botched birth, broken
in his brother’s wake and set by a marabout
tying it too tight with unskilled hands—
the arm still twisted eighteen years later,
a reminder of the mother who died giving him life
and the brother, unblemished, whose prospects
are as clear as the skies emptied of harmattan rain
when his own cloud over, doomed to watch others
drive the herds out in the morning or mount
the market trucks as hired hands. I know he irons
every Saturday. He sprinkles water on a pair of pants,
picks up the iron, brings it down, presses and repeats.
—Aaron Brown
Aaron is an MFA candidate in poetry at the University of Maryland and the author of the poetry chapbook Winnower (2013) as well as the novella Bound (2012), both published by Wipf and Stock. His work has been published or is forthcoming in Warscapes, The Portland Review, North Central Review, Saint Katherine Review, The Penwood Review, Polaris, Illya’s Honey, and The Prairie Light Review.
April 2014 | back-issues, poetry
Why can my life
from time to time
not fade
to black?
I long for a certain sort of reprieve,
for the baritone aspects
of a relief
that seems final,
but which you can come out of
once you’re ready
for more of
whatever the world
doles out.
The closest I’ve gotten
is an overslept
morning,
but even that
was filled with strange dreams,
irregular breathing
and a sharp diagonal
light. Still in bed
I look out my window,
the height from the street
momentarily lends
a mild vertigo.
I just want the night to last
a little longer,
I think,
trying to go back
to sleep
and failing.
—Anton Frost
Anton Frost has appeared in Parcel, Verdad, The Bacon Review, Grasslimb, and elsewhere. He lives in Grand Haven, Michigan.
