Portrait of a Liberian’s Boy & Other Poems
Jeremy T. Karn
Portrait of a Liberian’s Boy
about an anonymous boy
how do you hold another boy’s blood in your body?
it will only dissolve
into nothing
you have had another boy
deep inside you,
this made your body a tunnel
pushing things within,
inch by inch until you grew flowers in your pores
you’ve been walked too much into,
breaking your body
into a woman
this explains it
the softness that haunts your body
the song that sits in your silence
i remember the green ceiling light
bleaching your half naked body through the dark keyhole
your shirt rolled above your belly like a map
it peeled out the hardness on your tongue
& made you a small god
2020, tonight your body burns with memories, it itches for his smell
mother thinks you’ve replaced the devil
by calling another boy’s name in your sleep
Sickle Cell Anaemia
for A. Sheriff II
from birth you have been trained by your father on how to die
now you’re bored of breathing
it makes you too perfect at dying
i have seen your fresh footprints over graves
it’s no secret you love the sea,
the warmness of your mother’s hands
on your bones, cracked
like the living room’s wall
she, too, is praying for your death
you want to die your own death
from your own sickness
ingest songs that’ll plant seeds in your body for a rebirth
but how long will you keep lying in bed
practicing how to turn your bed into a coffin?
some day you will weigh the pain that carves
the smell of death in your breath
some day you will pinch yourself into nothing,
begging your body to fall into an open grave
The Making of Grief
I
out of cries i have made songs
i sometimes
hum in my sleep deep under my skin
i shovel out memories out of my body
plant silence in it
i have watched my silence grow into nothing
my mother says, it can move a mountain
II
there are things sadder than death,
like smoke that gains its existence
from a body on fire
the way cigarettes burn in Monrovia
reminds me of you – dead & burning in the brown soil
it stripped your body into ashes
but a body on fire, is the origin of grief
the fumes from your burnt body,
i have lived with the scent long enough
Jeremy T. Karn is a poet from somewhere in Liberia. His poems have appeared and forthcoming in The Whale Road, African Writer Magazine, Praxis Magazine, Kalahari Review, The Rising Phoenix Review, River Birds & elsewhere.
*Image by Mòje Ikpeme