poetry by akhim cabey

made love to her

and after going the fuck back

to my own country

like I’d been told—

aground with spear and shield

and gaggle of handwritten odes

in armpit—

I find our notorious shores 

empty     save the unmolested

sun-torched sand,

quiet dents left across

its gritty flesh

by the fragranced

din of you in the air

like the philter of boiled lemon

juice and cane sugar

you’d offered the night

I came home barefoot to pyramid

of burning wood,

gutted springbok draped across

my bare shoulders,

sunset reddening

our inherited sky, blood strings

dripping my ribs and hips,

travelling fatigued skin           

downward, pulled into the earth

like spear and shield

plunged into this beach

where you promised me

you’d be     because after this

I have nowhere

left to live but with this

foaming tide’s edge,

filling the hollow lungs

of my remaining days

in poetic recitation

of your medicinal absence.

savior

my mother poisons me in the Bronx at thirteen

with the daydream that her crack-pipe is a fife

whose melodies can be used to rethink myself into a son

birthed by radioactive spider bite or fear of bats. the orange

glow of glass and smoke guarantee I will one day

travel the stars rescuing damsels from fire-breathing

robotic pit bulls with just a blink of an eye.     instead I love

Sebrina from apt. 3C—a church girl whose bible

is bound in leather dark as her skin. I tell her the truth—

when she gives me the one chance—about who truly

bore me     about the false musician who poured fantasy

into my ear.     Sebrina covers a wide opened mouth

then crosses herself down a flight of tenement stairs

and back inside the invention of my life. if you see her again

in that long-ago borough, remind her, please

of the night she watched me climb the air unlike

an ordinary flesh and blood born boy     and snatch

that bullet-thrown spiral into my body with one hand

and with the other squeeze a parent back into

a rightful diamond. but beware of her offerings

from the good book: psalms that warn against hunger

of heroism and frantic imagination but not of watered

and blossomed fictions of original inhalations.

AKHIM YUSEFF CABEY is a Pushcart Prize-winning black author whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in Callaloo, Indiana Review, the minnesota review, TriQuarterly, Shenandoah, Passages North, The Florida Review, and elsewhere. A six-time recipient of the Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award, he is originally from the Bronx, New York, and now lives in Columbus, Ohio. He can be found on Instagram @the_fit_poet.