IT’S VAL’S DAY & MY LOVER IS IN AMERICA
After José Olivarez
I wake to loneliness. It held me tenderly all night.
Give my pillow a long peck. Tell it I am drunk in love.
I warm the leftovers. Serve a spoon of soup to the wind and say,
Come have a taste, Darling.
My lover answers from her sleep, in a city ten thousand miles from here.
She’s six hours behind. But I tell myself she’s awake.
And she answers. She eats the soup when I put the spoon in my mouth.
Delicious, she says, and kisses my forehead when I kiss the air.
In this Tango, I do the Waltz and Salsa.
At the pleasure park, I hold a book.
I pretend not to see lovers holding hands.
Or this pair seated on the thirsty grass, laughing at everything and everyone.
Or this brown gypsy playing the guitar, singing Ed Sheeran’s perfect to his lover,
his voice melodious like he swallowed a piano, his eyes closed.
I flip through the anthology in my hands, reading poems about America.
Wondering if It froze there last night.
Wondering what Georgia looks like in a map.
There is no place I would rather be.
WHAT THE NEWS BRINGS MY FATHER & I
Last Christmas, my brother moved to Kyiv.
He shared pictures of himself drowning in the snow,
His way of saying he hated the cold.
But a stranger at the subway gave him thick, leather boots, And a jacket.
He showed them off on a video call with the family.
Some evenings, he’d dress up in his jacket, and show us round the city.
My father loved the buildings,
He called it contemporary architecture.
Then last night, it rained shelling and the buildings of the city got wet,
and the people bled, and fled.
We watched the news till the lights in our eyes went off,
All the while, my father hoping that my brother appears on the Tv.
This morning, over hot cups of coffee,
we hear on the news that more shelling rained.
I dial my brother’s line and he doesn’t pick.
My father walks up and down the room for a minute.
He stops, picks a book and pretends to be reading it.
A picture of a collapsed building displays on the screen and seems to freeze.
It reminds me of the movie Book thief.
I remember Max, the Jewish boy in the basement,
cold, longing to remember what the sun felt like on his skin
and Liesel learning the word, conscripted,
And Rudy yelling in the void, saying, Hitler is a monkey’s ass,
Liesel laughing.
Then the shelling, Rudy lying helpless,
asking Liesel to say the words,
Death waiting.
I turn off the Television, and wonder
which girl is about to lose a brother, or her first love.
Adaeze M. Nwadike is a Nigerian, and the author of a poetry chapbook, Conversations with the Sea. She is also a writer and teacher. Her works have appeared or are forthcoming in many notable magazines in Nigeria and the diaspora.