Inside Of Every Poem
Apply for jobs, apply for jobs, apply for jobs./Change my middle name to Wait./Apply for jobs some more/Inside of every poem is a God saying/Thank you for your interest but./ Browse the internet, sweep the floors, do the dishes.
The Food of Our Ancestors
I am from Eastern Nigeria/where the power of the wrestler/comes from Akpu and egusi soup/a region that eats Abacha/to celebrate harvest season/when Abacha is used to tell about/the birth of cassava, the time of cassava
table d’hôte
visit wine capital Stellenbosch twice/mint rinsed in first splash of boiled water/be scalded by inequalities sousing all of these
Pharoah Sanders Donating Blood to Buy Food, 1962
And few of us feel unfairness more keenly/than artists caught between buying bread/and selling their souls, our markets incapable/of sustaining those who bear beautiful gifts
Our bodies need glorifying
Ripened mangoes, sliced watermelons/Discovering the girth of our throats/As our tongues paddle the depths of their fleshly rivers
food for thought
and why is there/this primal, human need to murder/to frenzy feed on human greed?
Comfort eating
Suddenly realising what to do/You scooped a lump of the mixture/into your hand, dipped it into the angry lava and swallowed it/lump by lump until it disappeared
They spoke habanero
They believed it was their real life, real language, real food/primordial, liberating, and they wanted nothing else.
We Were Always Hungry
We never went hungry/unless our father locked us in our rooms without dinner. If mother failed to sneak/us a snack in her apron pocket, we ate toothpaste to fill our grumbling bellies.
Blight
The Famine Queen is so pleased to eat our food, tons/and tons of meat and butter; the Monarch’s/not keen to see our cankered fields, the skin/and bones our children are. We are not her/kind, no fancy tea at four; we do not eat scones;
Mango Salsa
There are worlds in here/There’s golden fire, a moon and a sunset both, a dusky pasture, a sweet sweet rain/There’s a farmer in a hat, loading his cart for the walk to a town you will never see.
Sugar
She guards both your body and the wealth/of which you are the symptom, the/cause, the result, the cherry on the pie/Now you are crossing the emerald lawn/towards the main entrance like a knife
Homeless
My body lies down/in muck and mire/taunts me with its needs/food, water, a place/to rest/My body walks/talks to people/asks for fifty cents/or a dollar, for a bus ride/to some place where it/can eat and drink
White saviour
Sniffing glue out of Liqui Fruit juice boxes, the lost children stumble back out into the night, dreamless, in shoes they cannot walk in.
Bitterness
his trailer is crowded/with the others/here for la pisca/already planning the trip to/North Carolina or Georgia/for the strawberries/until Christmas/when Ybor City calls them
the Decolonial Passage 