Published in Spring 2024 Online Folio
Birdsong never left you to anthrophonic crackling ice,
no. Cattle egrets never pitched water, smacking
your face, across the bed after you returned
home fresh from sleeping with two white boys.
Birds come back each spring with no apologies,
like dogs will be dogs. You hear their voices rising
deep behind your eyes, how music plays in a stranger’s car
a generation away. Say warblers fly back from Ft. Lauderdale.
Why not? Icebergs drift north tuned in to the evening news
rebroadcast on Radio 1. Hauling-ass to high-resource areas,
geese pass in V-shaped skeins playing games of telephone.
When I whisper softly You’re enough I make you hear it
as I’m enough, too. Your fam told you scram after I bust open
your lip, then dislocated your shoulder; but you still want to
know how many licks will get us to the center of these troubles.
Migrations span one to several states. Hundreds of dirty
glaciers in a new container ship drowned last night
off the coast of Greece. Their white, dazzling faces calving
in sheets of blue. Separated fingers and locs of ice
float over summer’s fizzy spume. The coast guard arrested
every surviving glacier. Breeding and nesting, in our room,
you and me, unloyal and scary, in the northern hemisphere.
This piece is from our Spring 2024 African Writing Online Folio, an online-exclusive extension of our special issue, “African Writing: A Partial Cartography of Provocations,” guest edited by Chris Abani. You can read more from our Spring 2024 issue, available for purchase in print and digital forms here.
Kami Enzie is a Vienna-born, New Orleans–raised queer Nigerian Filipino writer. Work appears or will soon in Black Warrior Review, Chicago Review, Image, Obsidian, Oversound, Passages North, The Poetry Review (UK), and elsewhere. His writing has received support from Vermont College of Fine Art’s Postgraduate Writers’ Conference. He is an alumnus of Tin House Winter Workshops and received an MFA in 2023 from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. (IG: @yungwerther)
