Shopping Cart
    items

      ←

      April 17, 2016From Nigeria to New ZealandSonia Greenfield

      So men with Kalashnikovs
      red eyes and hand-rolled
      cigarettes strap bombs under
       
      the veils of girls as young as eight,
      send them into the center of town.
      Detonate. But those girls, their
       
      girl faces, girl knees, and girl
      dreams wasted are not mine
      to plug into a poem about disgust
       
      here on the coast of California
      where I lick and lick and lick
      the paws of my poet sadness.
       
      Instead, consider the octopus
      who escaped the ugly nubs
      of human noses pressed to his tank
       
      and the pits of their pink mouths
      against his glass. He’s mine.
      Under ink cloak of night, lid off,
       
      slime coat pulled close over all
      eight flowing shoulders, down
      the drain he split. Fuck
       
      this noise, he said, to canned
      clams and human cruelties
      before suckering out to sea.

      from Poets Respond

      Sonia Greenfield

      “I wanted to write about these young girls being blown up, because poetry is how I try to work through hurtful things that confound me. I’m a mother, and my mind goes to a dark place when I consider the basest level of human cruelty as it relates to children. But I also don’t feel that these tragedies belong to me, a white woman living in a coastal town of California, remote from what has been unfolding in Nigeria and neighboring Cameroon. What do I know of them? To get the details right, I would have to go there—if not physically, then at least metaphorically—which means combing through images to approximate a reality of which I have little insight, and besides being afraid of what I might see, it feels like too much appropriation. But Inky the octopus, on the other hand, I can tell his story. After all, it’s about escaping the human realm, which, in light of our follies, seems like a pretty smart move. Well-played, Inky.”

       ↗
      →

      Related