Jumoke Verissimo : Two poems

 

 

 

foreigners in another mouth

most people think silence is what fills the room
but the room is what brings                   stillness in
to speak its truth               and when silence opens up
to share what the room knows              the room’s
burden comes out in the air                   opens up
as if it were dawn    breaking on a frosted pane 

the strife & grace in departure:    the loss
           of skin touching     what is not kin
but vein & nerve & bones like how the tongue
meets the boundaries of its own palate (of smell that’s putrid)
of when we sit watching the collapse of another city      

like in the early light of november         when we watch the camera          pan
to a slow flight of ravens   the first respondents
heading for the carrion call          of flesh & blood & rubble
of sorrow that’s less news stories           when we know
it is someone’s beloved underneath the ruins
when we sit quietly in the room watching night news   the blues 

most people think silence is what fills the room
but the room is what invites                  stillness in
to speak its truth     and once silence opens up
to share what the room knows              the room’s
burden comes out in the air                   all open
as if it were dawn breaking on a frosted pane 

& then loss marks the soul with clarity             &
& then loss marks the soul with confusion       &
             sorrow carves the future
not much like joy              that once floodlit a shared path.

 

 

House on Death Row

I
i see. shadows as fish in a sea of sunlight,
maybe, because fish is the reason i am here today.
i, granddaughter to ancestral fishermen,
now fishing for dying stories, priced out of place
sit on the threshold of this crumbling door and absorb
the trace of realms surfacing as rows of tumbling houses.
i watch the rail line become a severing public art,
its jagged scar divides the area into an austere zone,
where weathered windows frame the sounds of daily toil
their backs turned to the sign announcing demise: FOR SALE 

II
GRANDPA IS BURIED IN THE BACKYARD BEHIND THIS HOUSE.
his grave doubles as a worktable in this space-starved tenement.
soon, he’ll be uprooted, dragged to a distant cemetery,
far from his home, so he won’t haunt future owners of this house.
But it isn’t odd to think he’d rather stay here,
HERE, WHERE HIS FISHING NET LIES, AND THE SHADOWS WON’T CEASE.
here, where his fishing net lay in their wounded mesh,
like a gull with broken wings unsure of its path to recovery,
my soul is the hesitant bird, aware the future is an already flawed flight.

 

 

 

 

 

Jumoke Verissimo is a poet and novelist living in Toronto. She is the author of two well-recognised collections: i am memory and The Birth of Illusion, both published in Nigeria and nominated for various awards, including the Nigeria Prize for Literature. Her most recent novel A Small Silence, received critical acclaim and was nominated for several awards, including the Edinburgh Festical First Book Award and the RSL Ondaatje Prize. It won the Aidoo-Synder Book Prize. Her writing explores traumatic re/constructions of everyday life and its intersection with gender, focusing on themes of love, loss and hope. She currently teaches in the Department of English Toronto Metropolitan University.

 

 

Jeremy Luke Hill : two poems

 

Microchimaerism

Microchimaerism is the presence of genetically distinct cells in one body. In nature, it occurs only through the transfer of cells between mother and fetus during pregnancy. The child's cells are carried in the mother’s body for years afterwards, perhaps for life.

We exchange cells with children in our care.
No matter how they come to us, we become 

one creature. You may as well divide soul
from spirit, or joint from marrow, or sense 

from matters of the heart. The mythological
chimaera was composed of lion, goat, 

and dragon. My eldest son is none of these.
He is the wolf, by way of a surname 

passed down through his mother's line.
Chimaeric cells increase immunity 

in mother and foetus, but also cancers.
This is called love coming at a cost. 

The chimaera of myth was slain by arrows
from the safe height of a flying Pegasus. 

My middle son flies too. He is the hawk,
an inheritance from his birth-father, name 

begetting name. We can't discern blood
from blood through human senses. A mother's 

wounds may flow with a child's cells and she
will never know. If she puts her lips to the cut, 

she'll taste only mineral and bitter iron,
never the memory of the child she bore. 

Parenthood guarantees nothing except
that we carry our children in this way. 

My youngest son is the ram, has always been.
No one remembers why. Though he has names 

in plenty, none means ram. The word chimaera
can describe any hybrid of human 

and beast, usually implying monstrosity,
usually when it has no other name. 

It might be used to name a new creature
combining wolf and hawk and ram. 

My foster daughter was not with us long
enough to discover her animal self. 

This has always felt like a metaphor
for what we lost. Cells that are transferred 

early from the fetus to the mother sometimes
combine with the mother's organs, become part 

of her body, so that her heart will beat,
at least in some small way, with her child’s DNA. 

Nature does not care when it falls into cliché.

 

Cuckoo Birds 

Cuckoo birds are brood parasites, laying their eggs in the nests of other birds. This behaviour is an evolutionary strategy that benefits the parasitic parents by allowing them to avoid the risk and investment of raising young themselves. This is why the phrase "cuckoo's egg" is sometimes used to describe children who are orphaned or adopted. 

The commonest question: How can you love them
as your own? The shells of cuckoo eggs can be 

thicker and stronger than those of their hosts
and have two distinct layers: the inner thin 

like a chicken egg, the outer thick and chalky
to protect them when being dropped into the nest. 

Adoption and fostering are experienced as trauma,
always. In some stories the cuckoo sucks the eggs 

of other birds before laying its own in the nest.
This is false. Another question: Is it awkward 

that they don't look like you? Female cuckoos
often lay eggs that resemble those of their host. 

I have been mistaken for my kids' coach, teacher,
social worker. I have known concerned citizens 

to call Children's Aid to report child trafficking
when a father picks his adoptive children up 

from school. This is called seeing something
and saying something. And still another question: 

How much do you get paid to take these kids?
Cuckoo chicks encourage the host to feed them 

with begging calls and open mouths. The basis
of attachment is a child's satisfied need. Cuckoo 

eggs hatch earlier than the host's eggs. The chicks
grow faster, evicting the nestlings of the host. 

They have no social model for this behaviour.
It is instinct. Not the last question: Why would you 

do some other parent's job for them? The term
"cuckold" has long been used to mock husbands 

whose wives are having affairs. Similarly, "cuck"
has become an insult among insecure man-babies 

for those they perceive to be weak and sensitive.
Cuckoos have no way to recognize their offspring 

once they are grown. My kids know their birth
and foster parents, more or less. Some traditions 

hold that the cuckoo, if burnt and the ashes eaten,
can cure stomach pains and insomnia. There is 

an association between cuckoos and loneliness.

 

 

 

 

Jeremy Luke Hill is the publisher at Gordon Hill Press and The Porcupine's Quill, small press literary publishers based in Guelph, Ontario. He has written several books, chapbooks, and broadsheets, most recently Microchimaera (Baseline Press, 2024). His writing has appeared in many magazines and journals, including The Antigonish Review, ARC Poetry, CNQ, CV2, EVENT Magazine, Filling Station, Free Fall, The Goose, HA&L, The Maynard, and The Puritan. His latest publication, the chapbook a nest, a burrow, a lea stone, is forthcoming with above/ground press.

arien wolf : two poems

 

 

 

list of things that resemble the shape of my mother’s body

a broken atomic clock, a bin of turquoise marbles, hair sweepings, a weakening

memory, blue dish soap pooled to a dent in tarnished stainless steel, a kettle of

just boiling water, an empty hand, a robin’s egg, an ever-filling clean plate, a book of

matches, vitreous plastic, a glowing magpie, a stone smoothed out by immemorable

time, a fresh set of dull knives, a cake made to look like anything a cake is

not supposed to be, a dreamcatcher with the price tag still on it, a postcard from

somewhere familiar but unknown, a fly making its home out in the open, a war without

a subject, a name without any index to description, a center without a place

 

 

 

sewing machines

give me a hammer a needle a bobbin to
make something stable a skirt for my sonnet
a dress for my burial a shoe for my offing
please let me have flowers have bows for my
coffin they’ll read when it’s after the tears
and the laughter they’ll mark my clichés up
with words i’ll get last of sewn into my
mattress like paper sopranos slept on by an
actress her jaw barely passes for full blood
italian a muff or a stallion historic parameter
outlines a race through the grapevines wait i
heard this new thing about sewing machines
& now i feel unclean if you know what i mean

 

 

 

 

 

arien wolf lives and writes in southern—california, studying poetry at uc irvine, where their work often concerns processes of identification and the many aporias that come with its representation.