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

burns for you

like kpakpo shitɔ spreading jealous

green in the ripeness of my heart –

add not salt to my pain;

kɛ i’sui aka shwɛ. Do not

bury my passions in ŋmlitsa – hard,

formless and scorching in the sun

for I have loved you too much

to merit such disdain.

Kai’mɔ fɔfɔi ni n’kɛ ba o’shia,

smiles we shared over ngai’s spat crackle

the songs we sang together, voices

as warm as water in a gbudugbaŋ,

already past language,

violating taboos as we shared kɔmi

kɛ shitɔ with maŋ –

kai mɔ mi nakai’o

kai mɔ mi nakai.

Kɛ i’tsui aka shwɛ. Do not

linger in the wind of our union

like a basket

of didɛ shala;

kaa ha ni e’tɔmi

tamɔ wolɛɛnyo yɛ hunu mli.

Ofainɛ kɛ obaa shi mi’ɛ yaa.

Kɛ i’tsui aka shwɛ;

don’t keep leaving and coming back

like a gbogbalo, doing a dance I do not

understand, for I love you

too much to learn

to love you again.

Dark Spirits

Home half drunk  but      with some degree

of faculty left    you find your exes      naked

in bed with the woman you're seeing now    She's her

best journalist self     soft lamplight lapping her

skin's contours as she turns from the lawyer to ask

the anthropologist about shame in cultures that cleave

tight to commensality    The sculptor is studying the clay

of her own nipples    her calves resting on the microbiologist's

thighs    They pay you no mind    not even the blues

singer who said she would die for you    not even

when you strip and perform that ridiculous party trick

with your dick      no hands as you make the little thing

dance left to right     that the novelist adores    You

sulk as the debate shifts to patriarchy       voices

rising as they coax and challenge    leer and laugh

resonant as they agree on your status as a sincere

but flawed feminist      a sympathiser      they say

      The chemistry lecturer spots you        eventually

points   The Kahlo scholar ignites     a fire    right

in the middle of the bed     and their fingers    like

a hundred licking flames beckon you      You feel

the heat of the equator as you lean back     mattress

buckles           the red of the fire pulling your locks

making you scream       Before your fantasies can come

alive    they turn to envelop you      like caterpillars on

sweet fruit    you disappear in the amber of their fusion

     When morning comes   your room is rich   suffused

with the burn and treacly aftertaste of dark dark spirits

Eaux

Oscura y sus obras

i

Three primary colours mixed

in a shallow pot. A blackness

beyond the reach of a scorpion’s sting.

I am yet to meet the being

who can unmix paint, restore

the pure pigment the brush’s tongue flicked.

ii

For venom’s cure comes from venom,

from fangs jibbed like a fountain pen’s nib,

is collected in a hollow, injected by hydraulics.

I say I am a dreamer who fills spaces

with wild doodlings; I place diamonds

in the charcoal of sketches, laughter

in bursts of gloom, but God! Who knew

the power that children have

to expand air, to set a ship adrift?

iii

A brush might ask its bearer: which is

darker at night – sea or sky? A body knows

which dark swallows it whole, but will stay

silent. There is a word for that. I go to bed thinking

there is so much space in the world.

Where are the bony legs to kick me, the questions

that punctuate the black like stars? How long

to fill a canvas with textures of night

without hints of blue, streaks of yellow,

the ballast of its memory of sunset’s bruise?

iv

One day I’m in a café writing a poem

about arachnids, sketching eight legs

because words are slow to come.

A kid comes over to ask what I’m doing,

his skin dark as my daughter’s, his dimple

like my son’s. I’m trying to fill the space,

I say, looking at my page, the black paint of brooding.

v

If the scene were painted again, the jib

sail rippling gently with air, the vessel silhouetted,

the sun red as a crying eye and sinking,

the water’s gleam a smooth carapace... Even

with what it knows now, with the pain to come,

the nights vast as three empty beds, my flesh

would still enter the damp, be swallowed

by its mood until the body, again, moves.

Caress

i

If I speak often of gardening and day’s

slow rise behind the creep of morning sun,

it is because somewhere along my thigh lies

the memory of a tomato plant’s jagged leaf

nibbling at my skin at dawn, your hand steady

at my shoulder, your voice gentle in my ear,

pointing out tiny buds that will turn to flower

then fruit. I hold the faded watering can,

its silver sharp against my grip, dark as yours

as we wade between beds of onion and kale,

lettuce both green and red, aubergines that stand

high as my chest – and all the while time unfurls;

birds bicker in the guava tree behind us, doors

crack open, the light spreads, its lustre caressing

your tight curls as you pull a radish clean out

of the soil, shake it and bite through its red

skin to the crunch of its white flesh, passing

one half to me. We speak nothing, Okomfo,

of origins, but I know you planted all these seeds

and taught me the tender and the harsh, the art

of nurturing them. And this is all I needed

to know of love – ever: a morning before sun,

the beauty of bud, flower and fruit, a father’s voice

with birdsong, the tart white secrets in a radish’s heart.

* Okomfo – a healer or diviner, a role usually inherited

ii

Between his first word and his first love, a boy

goes to Grecian lengths to undermine his mother.

His chores undone, he creeps beyond the horizon

of her view, past milk bush and fallen, rotting petals

from bougainvillea, into the haze of dust raised

by a fury of youths playing football, waits his turn

while idle tongues run loose with tips on how to love

a woman, how to dribble from one foot to the other,

scoop the ball up with a touch light as a feather

and strike – all this before he is first called to play.

He drops a word he retains from his escapades

on bare fields

by grass-choked open drains

in patches of fruit- and flower-flecked green

of the kind cities hide like armpit hair

in the air when his mother calls

and the hand she means to place on his unkempt head,

naturally, bears no tenderness.

He scrambles

to shelter by the mongrel that will soon be struck

by lightning, the one whose tongue she despises, waits

for her rage to cool. Thus begins the tutelage

of a man, salvaged from masculinity.

And now he remembers: the strength of her shoulders;

her firm ripostes when because of her short-cropped hair

men dared call her small girl, whistle across the road;

caress of her hand on his neck as she reproved

a teacher for caning him for his forthrightness;

her anklet of coloured glass beads that never broke.

iii

It is easy to be misled when your head lies

in the lap of a lover who promises all

the things you want your life to be filled with, without

so much as a skipped heartbeat. You will learn later

that a cricket’s vow is not the same as an elephant’s, that soft

caresses at the pressure point where the ear’s flesh

meets the skin behind your high cheekbones can shapeshift

into something deadly on a whim – but for now,

how sweet it is to be loved, you believe it all.

You will live in the sun like your grandfather did,

your children will know the thud of avocados

and mangoes falling unbidden from trees at dawn,

they will speak with your tongue, they will know both your songs.

It is easy to forget in those treacle-sweet

moments, the inflection in your name that signals

you have ancestors still owed for their hard labour

in the split rock and damp of