Rebellion on Lent Morning – Paul Damilare
let God bear the weight of my nights.
my ma says it is sin to make God
my errand boy. a prayer is no prayer
if it makes God do my bidding.
there is a place for such prayers
Guest Editors: Sarah Lubala and Logan February
Cover Design by Tochi Itanyi
As a writer and poet who calls themselves spiritual and maintains spiritual practices I hereby declare with outstretched arms, forehead to the belly of mother earth and wind as my ancestors that the literary bread of this work is ancestrally communal. The breadth, the ballad, the sonic structure of 20.35 Africa: Anthology of Contemporary Poetry Vol. VIII spans generations and defiantly plants itself in rich soiled pastures of won and lost kinship. Portals elevate rabbits to goddesses and cancers slow deaths to afterlives. Each poem kneels at the presence of heartbreak, severed umbilical cords or the knowing that can only be felt in the crux of a haibun’s prayer. Ase’. Every poem an intentional beaded work threaded by an omnipresent spell of words.
– Anastacia-Renee, Side Notes from the Archivist
let God bear the weight of my nights.
my ma says it is sin to make God
my errand boy. a prayer is no prayer
if it makes God do my bidding.
there is a place for such prayers
ecstasy cascades and floods
love as lust as lava, molten in my core
seething, all-consuming scarlet
as my blood becomes me
indignance to rage to roaring fury
you cannot do this to me
the missal: top most compartment of the medicine cabinet.
i’m thinking about belief.
and how cancer cells take their time in the host. also: slow deaths.
and afterlives.
I finger a masenqo and sing
this meadow buds with ballads
butterflies tonguekiss
my eyelids are heavy with nectar
one stomp of your foot wakes me
my eyes never leave your pulse
fuck Nostalgia and brass
fuck madiba makeba fuck jazz
fuck history and the ties that bind
fuck the fingers that play and
your hands that mapped and digitized desire fuck
Patrice asks why the word martyr is spelled the same in French and English
I don’t know, I say. I tell him that it originates from the old Greek word for witness.
But he knows this already. He’s quiet.
At dawn, she watches the river mist rise,
ears twitching at the silent voices only she hears.
The elders say spirits favor small bodies,
that power wears a soft skin so no one sees it coming.
Isn’t prayer a mirror of our lacks, our fears?
Mother and son observe the last ritual of departure:
the conviction that it might be another beautiful way
to name what makes her a widow; him, a fatherless child.
Some of us own the tyres
Some of us own the dashboard
The seats plus the seat belts!
Even the engine!
The brakes and accelerator, inclusive!
Just so you remember
always, we sing
odes to the participating ropes, odes to bodies climbing with stealth
family is willingness to be cured, pruned out with bloody hands
more theories on superposition, the logic of layering
after the war when i became this human
too wrecked for credit, wilting and in dire need of help
with a face of shame; its full material
my rambunctious descriptions of home within a house
I will live my death and kill my life. I, crater. I, liar. I, thief. From the crepuscular corners of my rotting mouth, I pus you. Glorify the bloated dead & poison & glue-board & trip-wire & cheese-trap & murder
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