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A friend of mine just published her first poetry collection with a big publisher here in Canada. It's doing well but I want to spread the word since it's a very good collection. Here's her poem which was a runner-up in a national competition a few years back. Family Affair they say we are a family that is good at death / i make a decision to hold a seminar on how to live / i schedule this party for my uncles on the first day of spring / my dead uncles play hooky with the afterlife slipping out of their graves while the ground unthaws / the earth still soft i could never play hooky myself / all my childhood my mother kept her hand wrapped around my wrist / a lightweight shackle that held me down all nights / a weight my mother gifted to me for my own sake the taste of iron swirling in the mouth henceforth / there was no option she had no other option / used a coconut shard to scoop out the pulp of the night. my dead uncles arrive to the seminar an hour late / they hover above the chairs in my backyard / my living uncles arrive after the dead ones and the reunion is a big family affair / my uncles grabbing one another grabbing me / grabbing all the seminar pamphlets out of my hands papers with titles like / interactions with the police / explaining health complications to your doctor / drugs and you? my uncles hand me back this polite literature / they insist upon an idea that in the afterlife / there is no time for posturing over anything other than perhaps a garden / someone you love deeply the truth of it they insist / is that most of living you never really learn the police come through / as they always do / breaking the warmth of the reunion / my uncles are squished together around a table playing dominos the police lean over and ask to play / the police lean over to claim that Someone has called about the noise / the police are leaning over what noise, i ask. half of the people here are dead. / my dead uncles do not speak in the presence of force / is that not what you wanted this is the living of not knowing and wanting more / a scoop of survival at the cost of pride / now that the police have arrived the party must end / my dead uncles / must return to the earth / before night / when the ground hardens / and although the party starts late / it ends late / if not as late as we wanted / but i still i feel so loved / I hold all my uncles together / they hold me in the spring we get used to the sun / staying for long my favourite void is from the valley of lateness / i love lateness / i love it like i love my uncles / my late uncles / my late late uncles both living and dead / oh, how i love / the suggestion that the earth can extend / that there will always be room for more time. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/717999/the-seventh-town-of-ghosts-by-faith-arkorful/9780771004452 The collection itself examines Blackness and family and crawling out of depression to fall in love with the world and life again. Read it!
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Mar 31, 2024 21:38
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| # ¿ May 16, 2024 21:27 |
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