“The Only Foreign Aid My Mother Ever Wanted Was Safety” by Ojo TaiyePosted by Timothy Green
Ojo Taiye
THE ONLY FOREIGN AID MY MOTHER EVER WANTED WAS SAFETY
after the four Congo refugees who died when their overloaded canoe capsized in Lake Albert, with lines borrowed from Kristin Chang’s “Poem for an Immigrant’s Daughter”
i kneel in the hairline light of exile & home. no one leaves home
if the ocean will swallow them up. strange how sitting in a truck at the Sebagoro landing site on Lake
Albert shoreline means peace. yesterday
my mother ate her own appendix in a Ugandan bound pirogue. not
because hunger makes you whole but because there
is a name for grief to grow into. i come from a small world—a lifted paragraph from one of the worst conflict displacement affected shit holes. i understand the need to
define as a need for hope. In Uturi, my relatives are dying;
not because they are Hema or Bagagere, but because
they share the same land with minerals. once this
highland was our birthplace. once we were birds carrying the sky
into night. now i wake to red sand & follow a trail of enmity & blood.
* * *
on the side of a road in Kasia province, a woman’s abandoned luggage
& a suitcase spilling out music CDs. what happened
to the woman? why is the case open? did she manage
Ojo Taiye: “A recent wave of targeted attacks has left a trail of death, destruction, and mass displacement in the Democratic Republic of Congo’s northeastern province of Ituri. The above poem is a sort of requiem for the symposium of endangered stars evicted to the water.”
Jhoanna Belfer: “I’d just read Rebecca Solnit’s book of essays, Men Explain Things to Me, the week before, and then heard about the Stormy Daniels interview with Anderson Cooper, and then saw this piece on the question of what “entirely consensual” might mean, all the while thinking of my own experiences as a Filipino-American woman whose culture and family values always taught me to put the other person, especially men, before myself and my needs/wants. So I got to thinking about all those questionable, if not outright abusive, moments that happen in a woman’s or young girl’s life that occur in part because of societal or familial conditioning that tells us to be nice, strive to gain others’ good opinion, be pretty/sexy/appealing, on and on, which I just don’t think most men ever think about. Or at least not to the point that they would allow themselves to get into situations where they may be abused or harassed or assaulted.”
Gardner Dorton: “On Monday, the Tiangong-1 space station fell into the southern Pacific Ocean. Tiangong is literally translated as ‘heavenly palace,’ and MEARCSTAPA is an acronym for ‘Monsters: The Experimental Association for the Research of Cryptozoology Through Scholarly Theory and Practical Application.'” (web)
Margaret Ray: “Of course, I assume there will be hundreds of poems about the March For Our Lives last Saturday. But of course that’s what I had to write about. The italicized lines come from Yolanda Renee King’s speech at the D.C. march. The poem’s last two lines are amended from Hamlet. And of course, the title come from The Who’s album My Generation.”