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"Poisoned Land" by Fiona Hsu

To bless the body, grief arranges for it a bed by Nome, Emeka Patrick

herald & hollow/ i hear the rattle of pain in my bones/ nightly/ i stay up to listen for my mother’s ghost in the garden/ i have nothing to offer/ nothing except these little pearls of eyes/ red & wet as the Egyptian lake/ i have no prayer to say/ except those i say when the world slumbers away into sleep/ the oral artist says grief isn’t a name/ it’s a pebble washed to the threshold of your body by failure/ i keep burning my mouth with a song just to understand how the birds dream when the storm visits/ twice i contemplated suicide/ but who doesn’t dream of heaven with all the hell we bed through on earth/ i tear down my curtains so light can disguise as God swallowing shadows in my room/ everything i own is lonely or aging or dying/ i want the birds in my mouth to understand how God felt saying let it be/ i want the flowers in my hand to understand how bliss is the last praying bead in the monk’s fingers/ i keep burning my sleep to keep my bed warm/ i keep watching from the window to be sure the stars are not my mother’s ghostly eyes winking from the edge of the world/ what about the psalms of spiders in my spine? what about the bat nestled behind my eyes?/ five years ago/ my grandmother died in her sleep with all those wrinkled promises & flurry folk prayers/ i am running far away from the sun only to end up in a temple my body once erected/ i kneel outside myself to peep into what lies inside the chapel of my body/ tonight i want the sky i want the stars i want the moon/ it’s the only way i know the boy is alive/ breathing undying/ with yellow larks beaking tunes in his bones/ to fill him in all the places the hands of grief once bore a dark hole/ a night wide enough to swallow a lost lamb/


Nome, Emeka Patrick is a blxck bxy and student in the University of Benin, Nigeria, where he studies English language and literature. He is a recipient of the Festus Iyayi award for excellence (Poetry) in 2018. His works have been published or forthcoming in Poet Lore, Puerto Del Sol, Beloit poetry journal, Notre Dame Review, The McNeese Review, FLAPPER HOUSE, Crannóg magazine, Mud Season Review, Alegrarse journal,The Oakland Review and elsewhere. His manuscript "We Need New Moses. Or New Luther King" was a finalist for the 2018 Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets. He lives in a small room close to banana trees and bird songs in Benin.

​Fiona Hsu was born in February of 2001 in Orange County, California. She has won first place in Yorba Linda Women’s Club art competition in 2019 with recognition from Congress, Senate, and Assembly, and she is a National Silver Medalist of Scholastic Art and Writing Awards 2019. Fiona is currently studying at UCLA as an undergraduate studio art major. Her works capture the aspects of beauty within woeful and melancholic definitions that narrate quaint and odd stories, in which she hopes her art serves as rusty mirrors for her audience—reflecting and reminding them of a quality and/or memory from the past.

Fiona’s works can be found on her website and her instagram page.
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