Study 1: Cheek
Dune. Collapse of silt into moonlessness.
Caravan of silt and silt-covered men
you turn your face. Retrieve your forearm
from the darkened lamp string. Bedroom-dark
plants his stick into your torso, you turn to me.
Adjust. Face the ceiling. Your face sloping
into blue desert, pocked with the footsteps of water-starved men.
I won’t travel. The pillow is the bluff. A look-out point
and out there grains of camel-dragging men
slow, under an unnatural eclipse.
Don’t return to me. Let me unhitch my horses,
send them careening. Crashing with the stocking
over your hair risen above them like a full moon. Return to me.
Give me back the expanse of your breath.
The gusts sat in the manes of rogue horses.
Tonight, only your turned shoulders matter.
And the ripped mosquito net. The termites nestled in the bedlegs, and you.
I am at you. Gales, death and space.
The sky halved, the blank night pressed upon the whirring sand
and nothing for continents.
Study 2: Clavicle
The kikoy is a stage. Your clavicle
wooden circus performers as I hold audience
with butchered beef slid off your butcher’s knife.
Are you tame? Or is Darajani set upon?
Do the uncooked chickens beat their feathers
out to air in defense of decency? Or are their voices
dripping into buckets. Did thighs recross and newspapers puff
back open after we climbed into the daladala?
Be not cloaked. Let your shoulders plume
an infrastructure of sinew, pipes of bone and flesh.
Strut. Let Dodoma grape carts overturn at your bend,
slavers’ doors slam at your mainlander swish.
Or draw back. Let the halogen bulbs strike you harshly.
And the pit latrines, let the prostitutes
spilling over their beers praise-poem you, serenade,
let and let and let. Let the robbers
slip into dark and the koffaya be brought down to chest.
Unveil, with slippers defying bacteria puddles
and the curl of the mosque. Expose your piping.
Rickshaws harassing enviously, angrily, your peeled
dark, your clavicle the colour of fishermen
and their boats. There are borderlands
drifting over your nerve-endings. Your curve
is its bui-bui. Your backpocketed hands
draw out the money-changers.
Keep this island at bay, beyond the white billowing
tents of cloth covering your kitchen window.
They are a small hail only, an inclement breeze.
They bring no power-out. Tighten your kitenge till
Stone Town suffocates into storm. We won’t be chased.
We’ll walk out, ringmasters, into the purple haze of our stoning.
Pack up the traveling exhibition of your shoulder
onto dhows, onto ferries. On to Mombasa’s unravelling.
Study 3: Lack
1.
It should never be so quiet. Muted turbine
and glass. Iron people hurried, jumping up elevators.
A quarantine tent is cast over your country. Planes lift off
and are flicked back, like plankton vacuumed
into USAID
You may not alight, with your tumbling along jetbridges,
Swahili baskets for my Mom and kitenges packed into your carry-ons.
Hand-me-down Boeings are paused,
mid-descent,
buffering over landscapes.
2.
This town is frozen over into chairs designed
to discourage sleep. Your city rubs its girth
against our border. It is ushered out.
Falling back to rain from nightclub doors holding you like a hat.
But you have not argued
over fees at a counter nor smiled out
of a bribe under slow fans in slow rooms.
Your knee is crossed over the other as you scroll
through YouTube in bed. And I
wait at Arrivals. With the porcelain,
the gate numbers and the white motorized
cart streaking away from me. Couldn’t
you have come? You’re built of daring escapes.
Of biceps not lassoed by rabid men, of bird-
dives down Pare mountains into coffles and backs snapping under ivory.
Is a high desk and uniformed white so imposing?
The milky Starbucks is in its garbage.
The hour has come for me to return my rental car.
Heaven has decayed into tile and glass.
About the Writer:
Yannick Marshall has published poems in several literary magazines including Wasafiri, Black Renaissance/Renaissance noire and small axe salon. He is also the author and co-author of the poetry collections Empress (2007) and Old Friend, We Made This For You (2009) published by Kellom Books respectively. He is a visiting assistant professor of Africana Studies at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. Over the last three years he has taught courses at US liberal arts colleges on East Africa, race, policing and literature. He splits his time between the US and Tanzania. Follow @furtherblack
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