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  • Featured Poets Series
    • 3 poems by Chris Prewitt
    • 3 poems by Taylor Byas
    • 3 Poems by David Hanlon
    • 3 poems by Bailey Grey
  • Issues
    • Issue 1
    • Issue 1.5: Hozier-inspired
    • Issue 2
    • Issue 3: Recovery
    • Issue 3.5: Lana Del Rey
    • Special Summer Solstice Prose Issue
    • Issue 4.1
    • Issue 4.2
    • Still Standing
  • Home
  • About/Submissions
  • Masthead
  • Featured Poets Series
    • 3 poems by Chris Prewitt
    • 3 poems by Taylor Byas
    • 3 Poems by David Hanlon
    • 3 poems by Bailey Grey
  • Issues
    • Issue 1
    • Issue 1.5: Hozier-inspired
    • Issue 2
    • Issue 3: Recovery
    • Issue 3.5: Lana Del Rey
    • Special Summer Solstice Prose Issue
    • Issue 4.1
    • Issue 4.2
    • Still Standing
I hold the earth at
​night in a field

for my father
by OTHUKE UMUKORO

In another version of the poem, we are out
fishing, afloat on open dark water,
surrounded
by the breathing of old trees & he is narrating
for the zillionth time the story of how he met
my mother. Somewhere along the way I am
a boy handing him a screwdriver as he bends
to
fix his broken car & a boy in memory crying
into that dreaded old building called school,
with his calm voice trailing & saying
be better than me & listen to your teachers.

In another version of the poem I would
show my friends the brightness of his
laughter when he shaves in the morning
& how he would always leave chunks
of meat for us, no matter the size of his
hunger.

A body is a calendar
gathering dates for
bones & echoes.

& in another version of the poem, a red-winged
blackbird smelling of deforestation is sitting on
the windowsill of the hospital room & the elderly
doctor is saying they did everything they could but
the impact of the crash left them with little to hang on.
I am pulling parts of him from the roots of a river, a
shared orange, a song, a silence, the discipline in his
voice & calling the space in my throat a working
object
that breaks down that remembers that gets lost.
In my prayer last night I said a body
in grief is bilingual & parted a sea
of grey fragments.

In this version of the poem, in
the open coffin, he looks like a
boy sleeping soundlessly in the
middle of a hurricane & how I
just want to reach out to him and
nudge him a little and tell him
mama says dinner is ready.

Still, in another version of the
poem, I tell folks I have been very lucky.

Othuke Umukoro is a poet, playwright & an overzealous woodpecker from Nigeria. He started writing poetry out of fear & has received a handful of rejection letters but they cannot dampen his spirit! His works have appeared in Sleet Magazine, Random Sample Review, Kissing Dynamite Poetry Journal, The Sunlight Press & elsewhere. He tweets @othukeumukoro19
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