local remedies
like the chekeleke song after it rains
like salt for licking

like prayers and hymns
like a fence of gmelina trees blocking the sun

like the plosives in a name
like answering yours backwards

like seasonal migration
like going back to wherever one is welcomed

like ice blocks inducing numbness
like moringa from a distant relative

like panadol—ampiclox—tetracycline
like obara jesus

like infused greens on the third day
like drinking with your eyes closed

like stuffing a rival’s mouth with sand
like standing tall in the mud

like one’s mother
like one’s own deliverer
from the journal QUARTERLY WEST
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"local remedies" captures a childhood shaped by superstitions, half-truths, and makeshift interventions—a childhood marked by the lingering referents of civil war and rehabilitation.

Chiagoziem Jideofor on "local remedies"
Elizabeth T. Gray on "Foreign Objects"

"What kinds of things might find a home in your poem if you expand your imagination to include unlikely source material? What could a foreign object—text, document, photo, image—contribute to your poem? It might offer context. A photo of a room or landscape, a fragment of a primer or contract, might bring background or other important information into a poem. The object might offer another, perhaps contrasting, point of view, overlapping with or at an angle to the reader’s initial experience of the poem. The object might offer authenticity. It may present contradiction or provoke surprise."

via POETS & WRITERS
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What Sparks Poetry:
Eleanor Goodman on Translation


"For Zheng, and for me, the function of poetry, its innate raison d’être, is to mourn. And in mourning, to point a finger. Look! the poet cries, Look! Look at everything that’s been lost, that we are in the process of losing, that we are throwing away out of ignorance and fear and laziness and greed, the habits we’ve formed over a lifetime and cannot loosen our grasp on even if it kills us.” 
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