TESTIMONIAL
On this land of my escape, a red tulipknocked down the metal door over my eyes,
but could, ironically, not get past the doorless frame
around my nose. Because I am both an immigrant & black.
This is not to say that a dialogue of bodies will not,
once again, arise to replace the awful argument of beholding,
but who can tell the gloom or bloom in a knife’s whistle
as it slices open the neck of a goat? Who, like me, can
tell the pain & torment of a loud victory that takes
in its giving? Dead words interned in the cemetery of my ears.
This is how they beat my silence into acceptance —
they wrap the sodden gratitude of my arrival in its unnameable Kumbaya.
The lady of the house making mushroom soup
from plants that weren’t even mushrooms, days when potatoes grew
on the field unplanted, says this is how a woman mothers
her child to count all the blessings he cannot name.
& I am both an immigrant & black. I am thankful
the way a plate is thankful even as the spoon takes all the food.
A DOWNWARD SPIRAL
I let her museum of hands blossomOn my body—
Farmland for my country’s unnameable loss.
She says she’s not dead. I said I am not alive.
My aged city is HIV
Positive. Today, she refused to take her drugs.
Crying for the woman who nurtured me, I lick
The salt in my own tears,
Knowing the rain is how the sky cries for me.
A tribe of terrible tweets hovers this month
With a gunpowder bag
Of broken lifelines. Even Time is breathless
Inside it. The woman I have known & loved
All my life is writhing
In pain. Yet, she would not let me take
What is not hers. Freedom, like blood, should
Be everyone’s inheritance.
My country is a penciled flower in the middle
Of a papered sea. & by flower, I mean
An unmoving ship.
I mean a finger stuck inside the jam jar
Of my memory. I mean my memory is a fish
— slippery when held
By the tail. I, too, drink the smell of burnt bodies
The way the city drinks the smell of dunder
From a sugar factory
Forged from expired semen of goats. I can
No longer tell the difference between what is
Dead & what is alive.
All this time I thought I was crying for my city,
My city was crying for me. Asking me to rename
The vicious virus
In her veins as if the vicious virus in her veins
Is not in mine; as if I did not refuse my drugs as she did hers.
Editor’s Note: The two drawings were created by Cathy Daley for Bola Opaleke’s poetry a few months before her passing in 2022.
Bola Opaleke is the author of Skeleton of a Ruined Song (Ice Floe Press, 2019). Bola is the winner of 2020 Thomas Morton Prize in Poetry. His poems have been published in Prairie Fire, Frontier Poetry, Rattle, CBC Books, The Nottingham Review, The Puritan, Literary Review of Canada, Sierra Nevada Review, The Indianapolis Review, Canadian Literature, and many more. He holds a degree in City Planning and lives in Winnipeg MB. Bola is currently Arts Community Director with Winnipeg Arts Council Board of Directors. His new book, Autobiography of Water is forthcoming from Ice Floe Press (2025).
Born in 1955, Toronto, Ontario, Cathy Daley received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from Ontario College of Art in 1975. Her drawings were widely exhibited across North America and Europe. Much has been written about Daley’s work, including reviews in acclaimed magazines and papers such as: Artichoke, Art in America, C-Magazine, Canadian Art, Border Crossings, Elle Magazine, Forbes, Globe + Mail, Toronto Star, and Western Art + Architecture, amongst others.
Over the course of her career, Daley’s work was, and continues to be exhibited throughout the USA, including San Francisco, Los Angeles, Miami, Chicago, and New York, Germany, London and Walsall, United Kingdom, the Netherlands and Belgium, amongst others.
Cathy Daley was the recipient of numerous awards and grants. Her artworks can be found in collections all over the world, including the permanent collections of: Art Gallery of Ontario, Canada Council Art Bank (Ontario), Glenbow Museum (Alberta), Kelowna Art Gallery, National Gallery of Canada, (Ontario), Nordstrom (USA), Swedish Hospital Foundation (Washington), Tom Thomson Art Gallery, (Ontario), Toronto Hilton Hotels (Ontario),University of Toronto Art Centre (Ontario), to name a few.
IceFloe Press 