The Geez by Nii Parkes (little red riding hood read aloud txt) 📕

in a London fridge –

one my father bought but didn’t get to drink,

kept for me by a well-meaning aunt. And how

hard my throat shrank with every sip, how sharp

that smooth black liquid felt inside me, how hard

these nights that blacken me, broken with grief

for a man I loved who can no longer grieve.

Hangman

Out of the benign madness of our homes, we are

players of a different ilk, dreamers with no respect

for height, for flight, for the choke-hold of night.

Round midnight, and the faded lip of the rim still

gleams from the desperate reach of a weak street lamp,

like a vaselined smile beckoning in the corner of a club.

We shoot our shots and indulge in wordplay, lines

drafted onto paper each time a letter is called out –

after the basketball, nerveless despite its perpetual goosebumps,

kisses the hoop and slides in. Our Hangman is different.

We have sheaves of thick blank paper and pencils in three grades.

We’re all artists: when we guess a wrong letter we draw curves

instead of lines and, because we like to fly, birds are

our thing. We call our game Wingman. As we play, feathers

emerge carrying streamlined bodies, the arcs of our three-pointers

truer with each attempt. We quote Rakim lines as the purest

form of trash talk, holding both pencil and ball like a grudge

although we’re drawing the same bird: whether we end up

with an eagle or a crow, we know there is no noose,

no pain, just the net and our dreams – nobody dies

even if one soars.

Ballade for Wested Girls Who Want the Rainbow

Wested girl, your city has taught you to hate

the kind of men you fall for, Pictures of them

flash on local news cycles every night

when newsreaders’ lips are twisted by crime

into shapes never full glass but coloured stem.

Pale news tongues never mention the melting of Shea

butter in dark male hands, fingers in grandmothers’ hair,

the posters of Paddington Bear that they haven’t

removed from their walls since the age of seven,

how they hum love songs off-key, the nails they bite

when nervous. They’ve debated the shots of Sembene

Ousmane & Kurosawa, read the words of Giovanni & Auden,

played around with fistfuls of chopped coriander

to render simple meals great, but the papers

won’t mention those things: those travel headlines you get

that label boys as men and men as boys and

boys as scourges, mark them out as threats

by sly leans of language. You know that’s truth bent,

you’ve seen these men’s tears, but come crunch time

you still see what you’ve been taught, what you desire:

their bodies – those vessels with shades of darker

for skin – with muscle, with muscle, with muscle within;

with muscle, with muscle, with muscle and sin...

and you forget the epicardium, its sublayers,

the spaces it cradles within, its pockets of fear.

Of Serendipity

Cybernetic serendipity was a phrase invented

for me by my father – an easy source

of laughs when a child can’t shape his

soft Cs or Rs properly, but a priceless gift

for his vocabulary. Later, he would explain

gyroscopes as objects with a steady core,

their orientation maintained with the help

of outer gimbals that spin. I never asked

what happens if gimbals break, if

a heart’s constant tread is unbalanced

by a break in the body that holds it;

what happens when serendipity dictates

that cancer is a hammer that knocks

gimbals out of shape? What I know

is: I was out delivering newspapers;

the weather was icy as death; I felt

my father depart at the traffic light;

I raised my handlebars and tried

to force my way through the red to my own

demise; horns blared like a final chorus

but my unbroken gyroscope stayed true.

Trumpet

The first time you blow

a tight-lipped buzz into the funnel

of a silvered mouthpiece, you understand

Charles’s Law – the one on held pressure

not Mingus’s well-thumbed message

of exact timing – that tells us all we need

to know about temperature and what volume

it moves. If it’s hot, it’s straight up

physics: volume is maximal. You knew,

but now you really know the fire

it takes to set that horn alight,

spark music along its burnished length,

the molten brass opening out

to spew

a resonant shaft

of burnished, burning air.

One Night We Hold

for Ms Bones

One night we hold and the lights go

out. Everything in the world turns peripheral

vision. We lose ourselves in the dark edges

that pattern the wings of some bright butterfly flitting

between your skin and mine. We let go of logic,

history; we believe we are beyond the grasp of gravity

floating as we are in these sensations we kiss

with. Time, family and friends swim

outside the urgency of our hunger. We believe

in the everlasting of love, never stopping

to wonder where we might drop anchor. We abandon

reality’s compass at the border of our lips. All we know

now is the spin of intoxication, a cocktail of sighs pitched

into a cauldron of dancing flames. We carry our own light

birthed, like campfires, from friction;

two bodies moved by hands to the melting point of Sodium.

We are salt separating into its elements, we are Lot’s nameless

wife reclaiming our story. If nobody else looked back

everything is a rumour. We are sweat without words;

how it feels is a held breath. Tomorrow’s story sits in

the depth of our eyes, limpid as lakes reflecting night.

Eros

Bottle

I think of the room, the way

it separated into definite things

in new light. the sparse spread

of furniture; the writing table

a chequerboard of thought, schemes,

the bed no longer neat,

and beside

it, shiny glasses, unused, a bottle empty

of rum, on my tongue the dance of her

sweat and the sugarcane’s trapped burn

stripped

from every limb her body possesses.

A story –

some old pub nugget of Ethiopian women

and their skill at splitting chickens

into twelve parts, with no need for knives,

just a tender feel for the limits of flesh,

the fear it must inspire in stray husbands –

comes to mind

when I imagine her body

that morning: the hunger that tensed my being

how I was afraid to tell her I might be

in love with her,

terrified

of seeding hopes

I could not suckle,

the salt-charged taste of her,

rum

that smoulders still

in the back of my throat.

break/able

Last night we left the blinds half/open, so

the sun would wake us. The train you must catch

more important than our week/long jive

with the natural order of things. This is how it comes

to be