Two Poems - Tọ́pẹ́-ẸniỌbańkẹ́ Adégòkè

 

At the Kigali Genocide Memorial

I am appalled by the horrors
The human mind is capable of;

I am at the same time comforted
By the great love and devotion it is capable of.

The Rwanda up the Hills 

I

We crawl along the winding road up the hills
In our coach like a giant rodent. The hills are carpeted 

With lush greens and forest tresses. Kigali sprawls
On both sides of the road, pages in a history book. 

Mists and clouds obnubilate the landscape to the left –
A hand blanketing the delirious tragedy that once seized 

The land, that once seized a people. The scenery to the
Right is a profuse pellucid print of cultivated slopes –

A testament to humanity and the potency of forgiveness,
A testament to the tenacious hope of a country. 

I am in two places at a time too. My mind, a conduit,
A long road between disparate distances. 

I am on the road to Goma setting sights
On the ordinariness of passage; I am travelling

Vicariously in Ranjit Hoskote’s Central Time to Dortmund, 

Bombay, to the dark recesses of history. His Mathematism

And minute details of the sky usher imageries before me.
I bookmark poems as milestones of my itinerary.

Pamela, my seat partner, coils to a foetal posture for a

Quick nap, her head slouches on my shoulder for cushion. 

Rwandan Pentecostalism permeates everything here,
Says Hilde, a friend I had made in Kigali. It is evident 

On the coach now. A popular Nigerian gospel song draws
My attention on the dashboard monitor: 

I’m walking in power, I’m working in miracles,
I live a life of favour, for I know who I am…

II

We have a stopover at Restaurant Kimaranzara 

I buy food and relieve my bladder and refresh 

My senses before we continue on the journey.

A few passengers disembark along the way, 

A few that just enters take their place. I bookmark some 
Enthrallments on the road: the noise of busy markets

That occasionally filter in through the window;
Lifeless clothes spread on the grass to worship

The sun before life enters into them again;
Springs sweetly cascading down rocks; 

A muddy river that gently irrigates cultivated
Lands; the University of Kigali, Musanze campus; 

The Bank of Rwanda beside it; collections of
Sedimentary rocks across the landscape; 

Bulls pasturing on a field in a village, a
Perfect copy of an imperfect English countryside. 

Now I understand why all these sights and sounds
Are made into the campaign: Visit Rwanda.

I’m grateful these moments passed through me.

I look at the sky, the chronicler of our journey so far, 

For kindness and for warmth. Its light is making salty

Wreaths around my neck. We arrive at our final stop 

In Gisenyi where we take another vehicle for the short 

Ride to the border of Congo-Kinshasa. And then to Goma.

Tọ́pẹ́-ẸniỌbańkẹ́ Adégòkè is an editor, literary theorist, critic and writer from Ibadan, Nigeria. 15/6, as he sometimes likes to be called, has been working on the connectedness of poetry and mathematics. He is the co-founder of Fortunate Traveller, a journal of travel literature. Also, he is the author of Transacting Stories, a chapbook of his travels across Africa, which was published by Invisible Borders Trans-African Photographers Organisation and was part of their exhibition ‘A Volatile Negotiation Between the Past and Present’ at the 2019 AfriCologne Festival, Germany and the12th Bamako Encounters - African Biennale of Photography, Mali. @LiteraryGansta is his alter ego on Twitter. 

Heaven Is All Goodbyes - Tongo Eisen-Martin

A 1978 statement 
 
My brother and I are driving
In an empty cell lane 
 
We are God's evil to these settlers
They might throw us under the shift change
 
We take wolf naps
 
We don't know what else we good at besides this traveling
 
State lines in a night tide passing through beachhead america
Passing with hurricane memory 
-Three thousand exits of sludge-bathed apartheid 
 
Everything south of canada is extrajudicial gun oil
And your local unemployment factory
 
In a few hours we will fit in                            Relax for now 
 
Hop out of the car and I'm a dirty shoe illusion 
Leaning on the trunk with the ghosts of switchblades
                                                                                    And other rusty services 
 
I am enemy humor 
And traveling
 
Father’s ashes on the back seat behind two sons
 

In a lane not for metaphor 

Well, maybe a metaphor about something unfinished 

-One million hands passing us through the Midwest

 
Last wishes by way of fishtail/Day dreams by way of collision/Home in the badlands of translation/Relaxed passing/Great grandparents' finger bones/Father's ashes /No longer arms/Just tattoos
 
Badlands imagination 
Barreling
Translating 
A father's last trip home
 
We don't know what else we good at besides this traveling
 
Exits in collage/Exits in pieces/Pieces of 1970s kitchen plates/
In a good luck refrigerator/We still ain't ate/The narcotic swing of how we see yesterday
 
Get out of the car against desperate white supremacy
 
Gas station greetings
Stray dogs
And other earth born alarms
            We are stray deadly
 
Against desperate white supremacy/And other senses/That die silly/And have murdered
 
We don't know what else we good at
Besides this traveling 
 
Two coins/ or the toll is us
 
Character interstate on a journey of a million parallels
 
Some like us better high/Some like us better drunk/Every late night has a summer to it/Cousin breeze and murder rate 
 
Barreling like gut born love songs
Your ancestors are smiling
 
As we pass the time
When we ride
It's language
 
Passed Gary 3000
Cast iron lining /Proud forearms for meals
 
Three man ghost story
 
Fishers of ourselves 
 
Cards dealt
 
Narrative implied  
 
Maybe something unfinished 
 
Like an Indiana hurricane
Or two midnights in Milwaukee 
 
Or no arms
No tattoos
No Chicago
Ever again
 
We don't know what else we good at
Besides this traveling 
 
And besides
Heaven is all goodbyes 
Anyway

Tongo is a poet, movement worker, and educator. His latest curriculum on extrajudicial killing of Black people, We Charge Genocide Again, has been used as an educational and organizing tool throughout the country. His book titled, "Someone's Dead Already" was nominated for a California Book Award. His latest book Heaven Is All Goodbyes was published by the City Lights Pocket Poets series, was shortlisted for the Griffins Poetry Prize and won a California Book Award and an American Book Award. He is San Francisco’s eighth poet laureate.

Selected Works, Tongo Eisen-Martin

I Do Not Know the Spelling of Money

 

I go to the railroad tracks

And follow them to the station of my enemies

 

A cobalt-toothed man pitches pennies at my mugshot negative

 

All over the united states, there are

Toddlers in the rock

 

I see why everyone out here got in the big cosmic basket

And why blood agreements mean a lot

And why I get shot back at

 

I understand the psycho-spiritual refusal to write white history or take the glass freeway

 

White skin tattooed on my right forearm

Ricochet sewage near where I collapsed

into a rat-infested manhood

 

My new existence as living graffiti

 

The new bullets pray over blankets made from old bullets

 

The 28^th hour’s next beauty mark

The waist band before the next protest poster

 

Bought slavers some time, didn’t it?

The tantric screeches of military bolts and Election-Tuesday cars

 

Proof that some white people have fondled nooses

That sundown couples

made their vows of love over  

opaque peach plastic

and bolt action audiences      

 

Man, the Medgar Evers-second is definitely my favorite law of science

 

Fondled news clippings and primitive Methodists

My arm changes imperialisms

Simple policing vs. Structural frenzies

Elementary school script vs. Even whiter white spectrums

 

Artless bleeding and

the challenge of watching civilians think

           

“terrible rituals they have around the corner. They let their elders beg for public mercy…beg for settler polity”

 

“I am going to go ahead and sharpen these kids’ heads into arrows myself and see how much gravy spills out of family crests.”

 

Modern fans of war

            What with their t-shirt poems

            And t-shirt guilt

 

And me, having on the cheapest pair of shoes on the bus,

I have no choice but to read the city walls for signs of my life

No Stars Over the Trenches Tonight

 

Malcom X’s ballroom jacket slung over my son’s shoulders

Pharmacy doors mid-slide

                        The figment of village

                                                            a noon noose to a new white preacher

Wiretaps in the discount kitchen tile

-All in an abstract painting of a president

 

Half man on scratch paper

Half pickpocket with flailing arms

 

double fisted

I am an alcoholic in search of history books

                                                                                    ruining the local train in search of

history books

I am limping to poetry

 

a Reagan meeting adjourns and modern plant life begins

along with dry out-of-body insight, tools and nails in a bucket,

a poor person’s bird atrium

along with unprovable music theory

-The poem turns into absolute political failure

 

 

Carceral state mythology of a factory’s first Black chaplin

Introducing:

the bible that goes bump

or a flower of harm

or the knife fight the day after the last day of history

county line cop lights gone cold like

bourgeois state lunch on an international bridge

-the Mississippi mixtape

 

 

A fly studies me at a border crossing
It has been studying everything at this border

Including the police graduation gowns

 

Open air silence in the pan

Then silence closing in on an imperialist opera

I mean I was there the night that

San Francisco disappeared

 

Like listening to Nina Simone later in life…

Won’t you fly a little, Lord

Won’t you put a space heater in my grave

It’s the people who facilitate themselves, Lord

 

My only change of clothes prosecuted

The government has finally learned how to write poems

I Imitate You

 

“Believe in the street, brother”

 

60s newspaper clippings and teeth hang on a string

 “Like a book of life, man”

 

The unfortunate alliance

between killer and killed

replaces the hippies with white people

 

 

I talked to class-less people today

They were not overworked nor military captains

They were not wage-washed nor born in a series

 

Maybe I am the last white man on earth

 

A church signals another church with mirrors and nose-drips

 

The spirit-world up and starts murdering city trees

 

My poem

My cubist-remade scar

My Saturn for adults

My junkie industrialism

Made interestingly heart-felt

 

“I knew my father as much as I want to be known”

 

I Make Promises Before I Dream

 

No unclaimed, cremated mothers this year

 

Nor collateral white skin

 

No mothers folding clothes to a corporate park preamble

No sons singing under the bright lights of a lumber yard

 

Quantum reaganomics and the tap steps of turning on a friend

 

New York trophy parts among

the limbs of decent people

Being an enraged artist is like

entering a room and not knowing what to get high off of

 

My formative symbols/My upbringing flying to an agent’s ears

I might as well be an activist

 

Called my girlfriend and described

All the bottles segregationists had thrown at me that day

 

Described recent blues sites and soothing prosecutions

I feared for my poetry

 

You have to make art every once in a while

            While in the company of sell-outs

            Accountant books in deified bulk

            Or while waiting for a girl under a modern chandelier

                                               

Or in your last lobby as a wanderer

 

The prison foot races the museum

 

My instrument ends

 

I mean, what is a calendar to the slave?

Also, what is a crystal prism?

 

“He bought this bullet,

bought its flight,

then bought two more”

Selected Works, Omar Al-Nakib

 

Selected Works, Mary Newell

Bank Tangle

Trainstop anomaly: twig nest                                 

tucked into branch tangle:

river-scan, plummet, breed -

Across the Hudson, homes

tucked in to bank slope:  

survey, embark, dwell -

settled in for the duration.

Nineteen miles downstream, 

smoke rises at Indian Point.               

As the river ambles north,

histories wheeze in eddies,

palimpsest laden with fuse.

note

Charles Darwin used the phrase “tangled bank” to refer to the intermixture of life forms “dependent upon each other in so complex a manner” (On the Origin of Species).

In the pith of diapause                                           

tone held through the gap  

between crawl-chew                                          

and flutter-sip 

weather churn

on the brink: wings rolled                                         

ready, colors soft                                                                            

through chrysalis wrap                                                 

slow unfurl

finding the updraft                                     

Note: Diapause is a temporary developmental arrest that allows insects to circumvent adverse environmental conditions, usually weather. 

In the pith of attenuation 

excruciate at the crossroads

chiasmic tangle         climacteric muddle        

Janus-pull     cross-wires       warp-wrap   

heed elusive   

    

scale-nuance      interval trill       attune  

         consonance-throb             

murmuration

In the pith of hover

When we stand still,

our heads’ weight tilts us forward.                 

Momentum prompts movement              

to resist falling.           

Wing flaps let some birds hover: 

a strenuous mid-air suspension   

            

kestrel matches wind speed head-on

poised in transparency to foresee                     

osprey hangs still to focus on foraging                          

hummingbird parades his ball-and-socket shoulder joint                    

his wing lift on up-beats as well as down

skates figure eights before

the trumpet flower’s throat

sips deep      flashes luminescence    wheels away       

We are left staring at vacancy  

sensing wake turbulence,   

vortex from activated wings.                                

Sometimes we wait alert,                                   

thirsty for an intimation,                                                  

an evanescent summons