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

earth herself, the rivers ciphered

slick with warnings? They began with mirrors, changeable

as their skins under sun, before they looted masks

with empty eyes - hollow songs, stretched goatskin under

untutored hands. Dead goats on their own can not bleat

the drum’s message; all the earth’s miles can’t sever song

from your tongue. I see your off/spring dance our river ‘(s) kin

v - fire

I will not speak of fire. You did not burn. Let me

tell you what I’ve learned; in one language, fire is

also invitation, you change the tone in another – blood,

in a third, fire is your father. It is not prestidigitation

that smoke casts shadows. You are the invisible man, Anyemi,

the woman at the back of a bus; I am the one who reclaimed

my name. I am my father’s second son; if I am missing

the first will be questioned. This is how our absence was

marked: girls and boys eating with twin names no one to watch,

fingers squeezing otɔ, but too distracted to know its fire –

an antelope with a single antler carries pain in the neck.

vi - bones

I will not speak of fire. You did not burn. Let me

tell you what I’ve learned; in one language, fire is

also invitation, you change the tone in another – blood,

in a third, fire is your father. It is not prestidigitation

that smoke casts shadows. You are the invisible man, Anyemi,

the woman at the back of a bus; I am the one who reclaimed

my name. I am my father’s second son; if I am missing

the first will be questioned. This is how our absence was

marked: girls and boys eating with twin names no one to watch,

fingers squeezing otɔ, but too distracted to know its fire –

an antelope with a single antler carries pain in the neck.

vii – paper

Some mornings my eyes water with your wounds, all

the tiny hairs that must have taunted the flames

before they spread their tongues on your skin. I am free

because you are smoke. I think of memory as retained folds

in paper that was once origami; I think of memory

as the layers an onion holds: both of them fade

in heat but something lingers; this be the twist

of DNA that syllabled Ebonics. Any rapper will know this;

that language is paper, that onions turn translucent

but collards stay green. I’m applauding you from outchea

money – mo, mo, mo, mo, mo, mo, mo, mo, mo, mo, mo.

viii – language

When we pour Schnapps on the earth, when you tip

liquor onto concrete, it does not trickle into graves.

There is a place called sɛɛsane where the trees bloom

with hindsight; this is where our dear departed sit –

ancestors side-by-side with boys assassinated for skin

crimes: this is Africa, this is America. Our nyɛmɛɛ

and sisters have been showing them the charts, unspooling

the con: in that world darkness defines kinship

not language. Remember the snippets of that Song

of Solomon: because I am black; our bed is green... through

the lattice. Language is lattice – we are whole behind it.

ix – cracks/stone

I have learned the caution of geckos. Black

and pale, they pale into the cracks of barriers;

when they lose a tail it grows back. We have a history

hacked off by marauders: what we’re taught now is knowledge

without a body. My grandmother on home soil was one

of the first trained midwives we are told. We are left

though, with the mystery of her miracle birth; who first

cut the cord that bound her to water? Who delivered

all those babies on the plantations in the wading years before

their bodies were allowed to cross the threshold of hospitals

their chattelled fathers muscled out of rocks both black and pale?

x – remains

If we have so many words for family, how

can you be gone? Brer, Anyemi, Omanfo, how

were we broken? I am thinking now of subtraction;

perhaps that is the unspoken angle, the unused eye.

The one whose fortune it is to stay behind may be as blessed

as cursed, for what becomes of the remainder after

the division? That little (r) stuck to its side like a sca(r)

while the rest take the ska? Breaking that beat, Money,

nobody is taken without family left behind, no chariot

rolls without leaving tracks. There are tears in our wake

enough to raise Jordan. The sea between us is common salt.

xi – helix

Listen, Ma, if between rainy days and blue skies

some fool asks you to prove it, don’t bother with ancestry

websites; I know by the way you walk you took fire

for me, I can hear in your voice the drums they forbade

you to play. Our unspoken pact was to somehow survive.

So hold my hands now, Ace, and let’s reshuffle, throw

out the balm of forgetting, read the boomerang’s marked hide.

You are no longer an antelope alone – we are an entire

herd. You can wade in the water. I’m looking out for you.

My antlers, like yours, (r) an eleven (11) on the head: multiplied

we equal 121 – one to one let’s unravel helices, let’s talk.

* Brer, Anyemi, Omanfo, Manyo, I’naa nabi, Money, Ma, Ace, Abusua – various words/slang for addressing family members

Tree of the Invisible Man

I can say nothing of its name, save the name

of the factory behind which it stood, the one bleeding

dyes all day, making gutters that once were streams

a carnival of bright death – green, red: Golden

Textiles. The tree itself was a lesson in the art

of contortion, its hard angles an eloquent semaphore;

clear lines of survival under abuse. It had a hole

right through its trunk. First we peeked through it,

but months later we stopped only to see who could

make a matching chink

through cellulose

– that narrow

body. I see its shape now as I close my eyes, the seven

punctures we managed to riddle it with, the pens it cost us,

coat hangers, twisted forks, a stolen corkscrew, the pale

gleam of those offerings at its base when the sun set;

the view through the gaps if you stepped back – squinted,

as though the eight holes were one, no bark between.

Its dark roughness is the skin I inhabit in this dream

where I’m away from home, visible as a threat, unnoticed

though breathing. I count the bullets shot by ganged boys

in