Naomi
Mouth II
if the center is to hold (lamentations)
when grandmother listens
my mouth is alien
foreign waters lapping at
a foreign shore
i have only the language of
her conquerors
within, just one small island:
khuhu, khuhu.
her name
repeated, become
a song
I dream of
lions. They chase.
Lurk below. Jump up
and climb. Kill. Me,
I have never seen a live one.
But my mother
now she tells me
how the lions would prowl
her village and attack.
The pythons also.
It would take ten men to kill
each one. Which was worse?
I ask her. It’s hard
to say, she tells me. With
the lions you would find the dead
later. Mangled. Eaten.
But you could tell whose body.
Parts could be buried. With
the snakes, there would be nothing
left. Just questions.
Another disappearance.
if the center is to hold (lamentations)
send me home
grandmother says
after one year in america.
i miss the orphans
the children of
my children
disappeared in the war.
send me home.
grandmother says
i do not want to die
in a foreign land.
send me home.
they are stealing
my goats and chickens
my milk and my cows.
they are digging up my earth
my crops, my seed pulled up
all broken, all destroyed.
send me home.
but father does not
and we do not
understand, kept silent
from anything
to do with that home
he will not
let us know.
Hope Wabuke has received awards and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Times Foundation, the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund for Women Writers, the Awesome Foundation, the Voices of Our Nations (VONA) Arts Foundation, Cave Canem, and THREAD at Yale. The author of the chapbook The Leaving, her work has been published in The Guardian, Guernica, The North American Review, Salamander Literary Journal, Ruminate Literary Journal, African Voices Magazine, Fjords Literary Journal, Literary Mama, Salon, Gawker, Ozy, Creative Nonfiction, The Hairpin, The Feminist Wire, The Daily Beast, Los Angeles Magazine, Ms. Magazine online and others. A contributing editor at The Root, where she writes about literature of the global African diaspora She is also a founding board member of the Kimbilio Center for African American Fiction and currently an assistant professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
