Color Bird: Cento
Jakky Bankong-Obi
for the Malimbé. for the long impossible flight home.
Love, let me begin by saying that yes I am afraid of dying.
So when I say I want to fling myself into the sun, I mean,
You do not get used to being left behind.
Every loss is a reminder of the previous.
I have listened to the beat
of slow wings across the sky.
Black shadows fall
against the southern sky;
the occasion/ infant light / maybe burning / light needing to be.
weary from its travels / sometimes we make new light / just for
pounding rain over bruises, pulsing.
Now a field of heartbeats. Open.
All of my bones/
light enough /to bury.
Perhaps the nuances are intentional.
Men want to see you bleed my mother says
of every dream, your father is where the act
of missing something first took root.
Geometry has put our home at the centre of the world: grief’s capitol, & suddenly
all the flowers are sick, we are not sure who to save.
Sealed with bruises. I am running back & forth between the house of silence & the house
this heat wave, mother of our circling, the name we gave to the far side of the horizon --
Water quenching our ruined kingdom of wilderness
air suspended into nooses. A brackish aftertaste.
I understand it is impossible to love a thing without making
it yours. Each scar, a color bird, is my love’s signature.
BIO:
Jakky Bankong-Obi is a poet writing from Abuja, Nigeria. Her chapbook What Still Yields was chosen by Kwame Dawes and Chris Abani for publication in the New-Generation African Poets box set, by Akashic Books and APBF (Spring/Summer 2022). Jakky is Co-Editor at Ice Floe Press and her work is forthcoming and in London Grip, The Kalahari Review, Patchwork LitMag, Gutter Magazine, The Poetry Review, Pidgeonholes and Memento: An Anthology of Contemporary Nigerian Poetry etc. Jakky is on twitter as @jakkybeefive.
NOTES:
Color Bird: Cento written with lines from:
Portrait Of A Saphhic As A Supernova By Emma Chan (Perhappened: Lovers)
Shedding By Roberta Amanda Yemofio (Contemporary Ghanaian Writers Series:
Balance Anthology)
Migratory Birds By Dora Siegerson Shorter (All Poetry)
Birds Of Passage By Henry Wordsworth Longfellow (Dodo Press)
Litany For Silver Nitrate Saints By Lee Potts (Sublunary Editions: Firmament)
Instructions For The Moon By Jasmine Reid ( From Deux Ex Nigrum, Honeysuckle Press
Debole By Devanshi Khetarpal (Redivider Journal)
New Organism/I Want To Think Like A Magi By Andrea Rexillius (Poets.Org)
Homeward By Alycia Pirmohammed (Hinge, Ignition Press)
Banach-Tarski/Suddenly By Akpah Arinzechukwu (20.35 Anthologies, Vol. III)
2015 Paris Agreement By Ojo Taiye (Trampset)
Fifteen Ways To Say Hunger By Sneha Subramanian Kanta (Ghost Tracks, Louisiana
Literature)
Of My Love’s Signature By Ernest Ogunyemi (Mineral Lit Mag)
Love, let me begin by saying that yes I am afraid of dying.
So when I say I want to fling myself into the sun, I mean,
You do not get used to being left behind.
Every loss is a reminder of the previous.
I have listened to the beat
of slow wings across the sky.
Black shadows fall
against the southern sky;
the occasion/ infant light / maybe burning / light needing to be.
weary from its travels / sometimes we make new light / just for
pounding rain over bruises, pulsing.
Now a field of heartbeats. Open.
All of my bones/
light enough /to bury.
Perhaps the nuances are intentional.
Men want to see you bleed my mother says
of every dream, your father is where the act
of missing something first took root.
Geometry has put our home at the centre of the world: grief’s capitol, & suddenly
all the flowers are sick, we are not sure who to save.
Sealed with bruises. I am running back & forth between the house of silence & the house
this heat wave, mother of our circling, the name we gave to the far side of the horizon --
Water quenching our ruined kingdom of wilderness
air suspended into nooses. A brackish aftertaste.
I understand it is impossible to love a thing without making
it yours. Each scar, a color bird, is my love’s signature.
BIO:
Jakky Bankong-Obi is a poet writing from Abuja, Nigeria. Her chapbook What Still Yields was chosen by Kwame Dawes and Chris Abani for publication in the New-Generation African Poets box set, by Akashic Books and APBF (Spring/Summer 2022). Jakky is Co-Editor at Ice Floe Press and her work is forthcoming and in London Grip, The Kalahari Review, Patchwork LitMag, Gutter Magazine, The Poetry Review, Pidgeonholes and Memento: An Anthology of Contemporary Nigerian Poetry etc. Jakky is on twitter as @jakkybeefive.
NOTES:
Color Bird: Cento written with lines from:
Portrait Of A Saphhic As A Supernova By Emma Chan (Perhappened: Lovers)
Shedding By Roberta Amanda Yemofio (Contemporary Ghanaian Writers Series:
Balance Anthology)
Migratory Birds By Dora Siegerson Shorter (All Poetry)
Birds Of Passage By Henry Wordsworth Longfellow (Dodo Press)
Litany For Silver Nitrate Saints By Lee Potts (Sublunary Editions: Firmament)
Instructions For The Moon By Jasmine Reid ( From Deux Ex Nigrum, Honeysuckle Press
Debole By Devanshi Khetarpal (Redivider Journal)
New Organism/I Want To Think Like A Magi By Andrea Rexillius (Poets.Org)
Homeward By Alycia Pirmohammed (Hinge, Ignition Press)
Banach-Tarski/Suddenly By Akpah Arinzechukwu (20.35 Anthologies, Vol. III)
2015 Paris Agreement By Ojo Taiye (Trampset)
Fifteen Ways To Say Hunger By Sneha Subramanian Kanta (Ghost Tracks, Louisiana
Literature)
Of My Love’s Signature By Ernest Ogunyemi (Mineral Lit Mag)