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Poetry

Les Esprits de la Mort

Les Esprits de la Mort
 
Les esprits de la mort
Nous reviennent plus souvent Read more »

tanka for the departed

wrap yourself in the
fabric of our memory.
ship it to me. i
want to unravel it. i
want to hold what i have lost.

Effigy

Was it Tina or Peaches, one of my mother's
vindictive personalities, who set the house
on fire with her brother still in it? When
I went to visit him in the Burned Victims Unit,
the doctors had just finished ventilating his lungs.
The hours hung long around his muscular-melted frame
like a bandage. Medical devices worked electric magic
to keep him alive. The past five nights, he'd spent
locked in an air chamber. Finally out of danger,
God was a reflection in the room--in the mirrors,
the windows, anything that let light in. The day Read more »

miracle

i wasn't supposed to be here. the egg
missed the womb. the zygote collapsed.
i set still, hid, prepared to float. death
was there soaked in nerves and plasma,
kissing lips that had not yet formed.

i had no shape, no thoughts. i was shut
and silent as a knot when fate found me,
trapped lifeless and loose inside that body-
tomb of the fallopian tube. pulled out, if
i had a mouth, i would've been screaming.

the clot of cells that held me together
tucked into the uterus sac. packed in
like fat beneath skin, it made me eat,
made me real. i feel now. i experience Read more »

Ninth Sign of the Zodiac

Black belt of heaven unbuckled.
Told Venus to push me out --
galloping and cursed, a centaur,
firing his weapon of war.

November opened my universe.
Vulva like a volcano, her afterbirth
exposed red ropes of lava. Was I dying
or being born? Being torn from refulgent flesh;
a body inside a body melting itself

out. Loosened heaven, or are you
just another unfastened place?
Too open, too vast even for your angels.
You've let them escape, unkept gates;
keys dangling around the jinn's neck.

And now we see them, like superstars,
falling nova and catastrophic, Read more »

Jaamil Olawale Kosoko,
Executive Producing Director
Philadelphia/ New York / Washington DC 
jaamil@kosokoperformance.org
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