No Hand Holds a Seed
This is my third day back in my beloved country.The flags have been flying at half mast ever since
I arrived yet no one seems to know who’s dead.
Maybe nobody’s dead, the nation’s mourning itself.
Kids wearing clothes that have never been new
wonder if the country was ever alive.
Old buses kill the heart’s percussion with their steel
bodies shaking off rust in potholes, stalls line up
the streets— skewed tables like eccentric sculptures.
Some sell dreams, some sell sex, some sell money
but flowers, you’ll have to follow to the cemetery.
There’s no crumb of current in the aluminum wires
that wave tangled kites like war flags, as if to save
patriotism from the mouths of patriots.
But who’s dead? I still ask, without speaking
of faith, in case they say I worship the dead.
Even pigeons have deserted this place, no hand
holds a seed, only sweat singing of mountains.
This is How You Grow Your Own Food
After Dambudzo MarecheraHe saw his sister’s body leaking
through shrapnel like a new pandemic.
The seeds of a tomato are tethered
to its placenta, its skin ripened under
a blood moon.
I’m the blood that wouldn’t leave mother’s
body unless I could fill earth’s shadow
with my own, in pendulous progression.
I’m her body that refused to be buried
when she died, her light still shining
from her lips, uneclipsed by ensuing grief.
Are God & death the same thing?
You might find the answer in dying, or
bathing, after coming from the cemetery.
My every bath is a baptism, exorcising
me of my fear of wet floors & fatal falls—
I’m afraid of being a found body,
three days & eighty-five missed calls later.
My own thoughts turn into scalpel
& scissors to incise my words—
when I speak I taste my own blood.
Dzikamayi Chando is from Gweru, Zimbabwe. He loves ice cream. He still regards Pluto as a full planet. He loves dogs & he’s published poems in journals that include Barren Magazine, The Rising Phoenix Review, Feral Poetry, The Daily Drunk, Wrongdoing Mag & elsewhere. Twitter: @dzikamayic.
Art: (c) Robert Frede Kenter “In the Ruins of Light” a visual collage. Twitter: @frede_kenter IG: r.f.k.vispocityshuffle.
IceFloe Press 