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

last twenty-five years: Don’t

Push It, Royal Athlete, Earth Summit, Comply or Die

… reels them off in his head, while you slip into Igbo,

speaking to the Canadian neighbours who share your South

Eastern patch of London with you. Falling back gently,

the way your Romanian gymnastics teacher taught you

in Lagos all those years ago. And this is the beauty

he holds on to; how you can recite his parents’ phone number

as though some magic has unlocked the forgotten idyll

of your unsettled Apapa youth. You still remember him

as the boy with a parting trimmed semi-permanently

into his hair by a father he saw when the ships came,

who brought you akara so hot he juggled it all the way

to your house, smiling as he told you he was the one

who got the first ones from the pan, first in the queue. He is

no longer the man who almost gambled your lives away, who

near lost his mind when your twin boys died

at fifteen: no,

he is again the boy

who kissed you and ran towards sunset,

looking back every fifteen metres to see if you were smiling too.

Year AD87: BM14

a poem in three sentences

Before the memory of spit wiped from your brow

in silence, before a boy in blue in Manchester

threatens to put you in the van simply for asking

what is our crime? before the grainy 1991 birth

of raised batons caught on camera raining on Rodney,

before Joy Gardner, Roger Sylvester, Erica Garner,

Sandra Bland, Sean Rigg, Cynthia Jarrett turned breathless

under a white haze of hatred, when you only blazed

in protest when you were tackled to the ground playing

football in a swirl of dirt, cheers and jeers raining

from the edges of a rectangle in Accra. / Blue-tinged

days when you were newly teen and only beginning

to edge towards the van of the hormone-driven youth

movement, before you know the damaging disorientation

of a kiss on the collarbone, a nip beneath the breastbone,

had you been taken to the side one fine Saturday

(after you’d wiped the chequered vinyl floors of your home

on hands and knees, laughed with your siblings

while coaxing the gleam from your parents’s cream Volvo

and had your cold water shower while whistling Whitney’s

new song, I Wanna Dance with Somebody), given lemonade

– pale green and fresh – and told that you would know love

many times over, that your heart would stretch, sing and shatter,

that you would learn the suck and spit of spent bodies,

that you would break and bloom, and break and bloom,

but through the mill of that mix of ache and injustice

in the world, you would find yourself a father of three

and friend of a clutch of formidable women you know

so intimately that you could take breaths for them,

you would have jumped up and screamed No way!

spilling the lemonade onto dirt like a libation,

your joy too much to contain at such possibility.//

This is how, come Saturday, when you pick your kids

up, you are always so stunned, because who would believe the tooli that

in a world that showers so much terror on skin so dark

you could still make, out of one lemonade-drinking boy so blue,

a full-muscled girl, a wise-cracking boy and a wide-grinning girl? ///

A Concise Geography of Heartbreak

HUMAN

...it starts from the skin, the same way

Europeans came from the shore, smiling,

setting up trading posts. When they whisper

in your ears, nibble on your lobes, sending

a shiver running through you, that’s Stanley

pretending to be an explorer, but under contract

to King Leopold. A finger runs down

your chest, raising goosebumps, your lips

lock and your oil reserves run free.

ENVIRONMENTAL

You are learning

a new language, every limb of your body

possessed by the fire of this love that smelts

gold, aluminium, copper, tin and iron ore. You run

when they ask,

doing do-for-love things, making their lives

easier. Meanwhile, they are with friends planning

how to deceive you, use you – it’s the Berlin Conference

in kisses. They are all up inside you,

you are in your feelings, sappy

as sliced rubber trees.

PHYSICAL

You want to drop seeds and shit,

hell, maybe you do – one or two –

until some night, the forest fires start.

It’s like the worst kind of heartburn –

all that BS you’ve swallowed.

You start an independence movement,

define limits, draw borders. They come pleading,

they offer enticements, Ambassadors

make compelling cases, seeding tears

in your eyes. But once you have seen

their true purpose, you can’t unsee it: you must

save your heart – even if it means you will hurt,

even if the new country your carve is

an assembly of broken things. It is yours.

You will compose an anthem

and sing it like an orgasm. You will

sew a flag from fragments of new insight,

fly it as high as you hold your head.

Underbelly

You are seven, her eyes are molten,

her chin weighs what your thinking

weighs on the heels of your palms,

your fingers are feathers along the lines

of her cheekbones. She is about to kiss

you, but a gaggle of friends come in

and she spits in your face instead.

You will remember that moment when

you are twenty-eight and you trace

the point when a lover you meant to marry

turned sour on you, to an evening out

with her girlfriends discussing the lure

of unpredictable men. Suddenly she’s asking

about circumcision – a new interest in dicks.

The twenty-one year gap in betrayals

hasn’t changed you. Your boys don’t understand,

neither can the ex’s friend who sleeps with you

now: how can you be so calm – happy even?

But your thoughts are feather-light with little

memories: the euphoric pull of dark eyes, loving

moments together, away from the baying crowds.

lenguaje

Whisper to me in the language I know

when I know no language, when my face

still bears the map of sleep, the clear trace

of fatigue passing, mute and steady as breath.

Call out at the hour when I am uncertain

whether the sky’s clustered darkness threatens

rainfall or signals night fading away.

Coax my protest muscle from my mouth’s shell,

coat my lips with a fine dew of argument

and place your morning plea beyond barriers

of translation. Let tongue touch tongue, test,

and by degrees reach fluency in the lingua

that calls forth the earth’s children, conjures flesh

from lust. I entreat you with love – in Ga.

Kɛ i’tsui aka shwɛ

“You see, I could conceive death,

but I could not conceive betrayal.” – Malcolm X

Ojotswalɔ, my heart