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October 19, 2021

Two Poems

I.S. Jones

CAN YOU SPEAK YORÙBÁ…?

 

I ask my father the word for “thief” in Yoruba.
He says olè, says it also means “lazy” [ọlẹ].

Ask him for “rain”, he says òjò,
that it’s the same word for “coward” [ojo].

It’s been said that you begin to master
a language when you dream in it.

I ask my father if his mother visits his sleep,
searching the dark with his face for her hands.

Faithful as nightfall, my father doesn’t answer.
Calls me buruku, a word he won’t translate

but I know is a rebuke by the way it undoes my name.
So, I slip the word, heavy as a shotshell, into my mouth.

There are other ways to spell silence:
a faceless hunter moves towards a black fawn.

Snow renames the landscape, but there isn’t a word
for “snow” in Yoruba. Language retreats where it isn’t felt.

A buckshot rings its bells to the sky. A herd of deer scatter
the day’s remains & are chased by their panic into the night.

I ask my father how to say “yes” in Yoruba. He says
béè ni, but that it also translates to “It is so”.

The hunter moves as the fawn moves: through the procession of tress
taking aim between the eyes. My bleeding skull knighted to the floor.

Forgive the tongue that flexes towards what it knows best.
Ojo, ojo. I kept saying “coward” when I meant to say “rain”.

 

 

 

INTERVIEW WITH THE AMERICAN / NIGERIAN

 

Your voice [        ]  [        ] is highly engaging and intense. What is the [          ] process of this?

We spend our lives running away from or towards a truth. Anthony Ragler tried to rape me in my sleep____ then tried to punched the truth down my throat. Throat being a wound. Wound being another word for “father.” The dark space my father left behind is a father. The dark space his father left behind is a father. I felt the night’s soft flesh attempt to enter me. ____I can’t tell you if Anthony Ragler finished what was started -------. The hunter still gives chase, a specter splintering through the bramble. From my eye’s pocket, hunters stream the forest, snow memorizing the game of venery: a black fawn closing the distance between capture & dawn, men trampling the landscape into sirens & dirt. I understand now: some men prefer it this way. Fucking tastes sweeter to them when it’s something they’ve stolen. Between his panting, Anthony Ragler heavy in my ear, I want you to remember what this feels like. ----- For months after _____ nightmares flooded my eyes. “Why do any of us return / to that which has promised to slaughter us?” I am a Black woman. No one is coming to save me ----- “This story is not about you taking this repulsion / from me / but about this yearning / which both opened me & nearly killed me.” What kind of desert was I to believe thirst has only a single tongue? Nigerian men fetishize my accent: Your voice is clean like water. I like your mouth, Oyinbo. It sounds so foreign. Nothing like the way we speak. I move towards what is pertinent to my survival, how I dig my true name out of the dirt.

I.S. Jones is a queer American Nigerian poet and music journalist. She is a Graduate Fellow with The Watering Hole and holds fellowships from Callaloo, BOAAT Writer’s Retreat, and Brooklyn Poets. I. S. hosts a month-long workshop every April called The Singing Bullet. I.S. coedited The Young African Poets Anthology: The Fire That Is Dreamed Of (Agbowó, 2020) and served as the inaugural nonfiction guest editor for Lolwe. She is a Book Editor with Indolent Books, Editor at 20.35 Africa: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry, freelances for Complex, Earmilk, NBC News THINK, and elsewhere. Her works have appeared or are forthcoming in Guernica, Frontier Poetry, Washington Square Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Hobart Pulp, The Rumpus, The Offing, Shade Literary Arts, Blood Orange Review, Honey Literary and elsewhere. Her work was chosen by Khadijah Queen as a finalist for the 2020 Sublingua Prize for Poetry. She is an MFA candidate in Poetry at UW–Madison as well as the Inaugural 2019­­–2020 Kemper K. Knapp University Fellowship recipient. Her chapbook Spells Of My Name is forthcoming with Newfound in 2021. She splits her time between Southern California and New York.