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Gray Fox
Years later on the headlands, chevrons
of seed stalks brim with light, midsummer
in a parched year, feral tang of eucalyptus,
walking slowly, scanning for her coat
of ash and gold in an arid field, the neat
triangle of her face, so long I've known
this animal, since my daughter was a child
and first saw her, stretched out her arm
to the dark-rimmed eyes holding our gaze,
afternoon flecked with summer ending,
she's a drift of gold in dry air, topaz
of her stare regarding us, stopping time,
that moment carried with me since, leaf shadow,
mottled shade now disappearing into...
now vanishing, but here this whole way
on the other side, her sharp face, time past
and time to come, hope like electricity
in a cloud, that this wildness should last.
That she holds on. That she found a way
to pass life through her.
First published in Bosque
No, She Didn't Think the Road Was Dangerous
Eastern Congo
she walked that road every day,
the aid worker translates for the stranger—
Faida bending in the peanut field, muscles
warming and stretching, silk of sweat
at the nape of her neck,
then the two hour trudge to market at Minova
with peanuts in a sack on her back,
thinking only of her return with firewood.
She met the soldiers in the afternoon,
hardly more than boys, whether Mai-Mai
or Hutu she never knew.
One boy wore a Nike tee and smiled
when he said you can choose life,
or death. She tried to run. Here,
she looks up, her eyes beseech
the journalist, he forces
himself not to look away—
she shakes her head,
the same road I always took,
here, the story breaks down,
she holds an envelope
in her hand, a letter
from her husband, her exile
followed from his words—
moving lost through fields
of manioc, down red clay paths
thirty miles to tin-roofed Goma,
baby in a sling on her hip—
she takes out a single sheet
folded in thirds, covered in script,
small hoard of invaders, jointed legs
segmented bodies, breastplates,
her hand trembles, a sudden burst
of rain beats down, street filling,
words boil forth like a nest of ants
and the words swim—she cannot read
the words and the journalist cannot
read the words—and the rain pounds
and the water shouts you are cast out,
you have no home. And after a bit,
air quiets, the translator falls silent—
she’s two inches in a piece on rare
earth, one among a quarter million,
a beggar, a statistic, her name is Faida—
and now the baby sobs, Faida bends
to the glassy dark of his eyes, O little one,
hush; hush now thy lamentations.
First published in Solo Novo
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Photo by: Alexis Rhone Fancher
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