Recognition
Did you grow a bean plant
as a school science project,
noting carefully in a jotter
book the stages of growth
that a dark green textbook
taught? They did not say,
the books, what to do with
a fully grown bean plant,
and so I reluctantly threw
it down the rubbish chute,
feeling bad at the thought
of leaves squelched with
gum, hair, chicken bones,
the slender white stalk
bent. Did you dig a hole
in the schoolyard secretly
and plant an orange pip,
then watch the soil keep
quiet? Did you keep chicks
(all the children did) as if
you were back in a village?
After accidentally stepping
on one to death, did you
give away the other chick
because someone told you
that it would die if it lived
alone? Did you hear that
or did you, my country
woman, hear another say,
no one dies of loneliness?
Or did you hear both voices,
sometimes in competition
like car horns, sometimes
in counterpoint, when you
signed the divorce papers,
when the Senior Minister
in an interview regretted
sending women to school,
when you lectured on the
Romantics, remembering
the bean plant cast away
in its plastic mould, when
your daughter shifted on
your hip, when you wrote,
the home airconditioning
clicking, humming, raising
goose bumps, a poem?
Reversi, Also Called Othello
Flip over a black
lie to white. Flip
coffee in a diner
mug. Flip 1st sight.
Flip a coin. Flip girls
and boys. Flip and
then flip back black
light. White noise.
Flip a ship on its
side. Flip two sides.
Flip the living and
the dead just died.
Flip dark hair on
pale shin. Flip a
treasured negative.
Flip a safety pin.
Useless
When she was sucking the bone clean of marrow
at a feast thrown by him for his now woman,
when his now woman snuggled close up to him,
smacking her lips over the bone he’d picked for her,
when everyone agreed what a great feast it was
and congratulated her for being the birth reason,
when she said, in reply, that just four days ago
they had celebrated their third together year,
the once woman put her bone away. For two months
he lay with his now woman before he left her.
She had no words for this useless discovery.
The whole night the marrow bubbled in her mouth.