ISSN: 1941-4137
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
Honora Ankong is a queer Cameroonian-American poet. She is currently a Virginia Tech MFA in poetry candidate. Her works exist in and explore the different landscapes where her identities intersect. She is constantly complicating and reimaging the confines of the African Diaspora. She has work forthcoming in the Peregrine Journal and Lolwe.
My mother birthed me of dust
It was March & dry — the first cries
for the rainy season had just been heard. She reached
into the earth and carved me into her likeness.
Whispered into my bones I will take you farther
than any man could ever. She bottled up all
her suffering and lodged it into my throat
She bid me: Sing — & I entered
the world with my best cry rehearsed.
I’m not saying she is god but men create life for abandon,
she held me I was small-er than most
babies she held me the doctors were worried —
I was small she held the whole world
in her arms. She held my whole. What is the world
but an infant entering?
Some days I find myself singing
about men and heartbreak as if
the first lesson that I learned didn’t have to do with men
being fraught. My mother urges
me to marry like a good daughter as if
I did not read from her silence “You cannot bury yourself
in a man and hope for anything other
than ruin to come sprouting when the rainy season comes.”
Glass: A Journal of Poetry is published monthly by Glass Poetry Press.
All contents © the author.
All contents © the author.
