the national poetry month issue || handicap
TRANSCRIPT
University of Northern Iowa
HandicapAuthor(s): Malcolm AlexanderSource: The North American Review, Vol. 291, No. 2, The National Poetry Month Issue (Mar. -Apr., 2006), p. 26Published by: University of Northern IowaStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25127566 .
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NAR
EMILY E. BRIGHT
A Hundred Things For Mama losephine, a refugee from the Democratic Republic of Congo
Someone asked me yesterday at work
whether I had ever lived inside a hut and whether we had grocery stores where I come from.
Pardon me? I asked.
His face was serious as stone.
It will take a year to translate my degree officially, and then, I will hang it on the wall to
stop all the assumptions. Please,
ask me all you wish. The answer is a story.
Listen. What I miss from home
changes with the day, sometimes
spices, turns of phrase.
Being understood. The shadows on the wall are shorter here; no women carry baskets on their heads.
I used to dream of being in America, but now that I am here, I am Africa misplaced.
Americans don't feel their muscles coil into ropes each time
a soldier boards the bus. They do not fear
that he has come for them. When their children turn
to gawk, as children do, their eyes hold only fascination.
Long ago I learned to swallow fear and sorrow like giant rocks
into my stomach. It is a hungry silence, a necessary crime
to never speak and never scream, no matter
who is killed in front of you. These memories are woven in my skin.
There are a hundred things to make me long for
anywhere but where I am.
I woke up this morning tasting pumpkin leaves
the way my mother makes them, with onions and a spoonful of peanut butter for the taste.
MALCOLM ALEXANDER
Handicap
He's barely a teenager
in the eternal revolution
of some backwater African republic and at his age
ought to be chasing young girls or wild game,
but not him, for recently his allegiance to the junta in power that week
was called into question,
and like a hundred fellow tribesmen
he had both his hands cut off.
He was once quick
with a rifle but now
can't even wipe his ass,
and though he says he wishes he were dead,
he can neither grip the gun nor pull the trigger.
26 NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW March-April 2006
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