24 Poems ~ 24 Hours
Midnight feeder,
morning porch booby-trapper,
you hide in plain sight.
Scaring humans much bigger
and catching insects unaware.
Your game is survival and deception.
Intricate webbing catches the light
and reveals a fortified trap.
Patiently awaiting the next meal,
and unaware of dread you create.
I am Kinte, Ghanian by blood, related to Kings, divinely loved
I am a Kinte Ghanaian you see, Abrahamic kinswoman, royality
I am a Kinte Abraham’s seed, roses, all creation is subject to me.
I am a Kinte, I’ve been dragged through hell, my vision is might ,I am beautiful , I am Kinte, My blood flows through your veins. Our mother is Eve, unlike her, be not deceived.
Eight legged creature
Spin your web
Let us stop
Admiring our own
Creations
Through your eyes
Sparking strings are spun
Let the lovers
Learn where
Our beauty grows
From the heart
Small and vulnerable
Bitten more than once
I did not understand the road she walked,
Until it was my turn to walk it too.
I did not understand how it was,
To lose a parent so soon.
I did not understand the ache,
The longing for one more talk.
To have one more moment you stroke my hair,
One more shopping walk.
A friend walked the road after me,
I try to help how I can.
Keeping her company as she grieves,
As she tries to understand.
I understand now the road she walked,
Everything changed that day.
I still long for her again to talk,
To know I’ll be okay.
I want to be my shadow
trade places for a day
go where she goes
what adventures she must
go on
always disappearing when I’m inside
To be my shape without a face
a blank slate
eyes that see but not be seen within
my secret smile
a hidden dance
a glowing dark world of my own
I want to be my shadow
an outline without a face
able to disappear
I first noticed her web
in the apple tree
after the rain,
holding droplets
and waving like a flag in the breeze after the storm,
a misleading wave
like surrender
when it is all really a trap
and it isn’t sunlight captured in those droplets
but death and darkness
in a flirtatious curl
tempting others
unsuspecting
or poorly educated
to venture across these webby strands
a shortcut,
oh yes, a short cut,
a life to be cut
short,
a baffled cootie now destined to be
the next meal
how more civilized as I
walk across the yard
and pluck
an apple from the tree
take a bite
after the spider and I pray together,
“bless us, oh Lord, and these thy gifts”
Once my disbelief wore off, I started jumping up and down. She shot me a look that told me to check my enthusiasm and put on an apron. (How do old women communicate so much with just one sideways glance?) At the counter, she let me watch as she mixed the flour and eggs and water to make the money. Then it was my turn. She turned the money out onto the floury counter, and told me to knead it. I had barely made a turn of the money before she was behind me, pinching my arm. “Feel that? That’s what you’re doing to the money! How do you think it feels, being pinched like that?”
I looked at her like she was insane. How does the money feel? But a few more corrective arm pinches and I was massaging that money with the same care and attention you’d use to powder a baby’s bottom. Soon, I announced I was done and the money was ready to be rolled out.
“How do you know it’s done?” Grandma asked.
It was a good question. How did I know it was done? I don’t know. It just was—it was done. Grandma looked at me with an expression at once amused and relieved.“You are ready now, Nicole,” she said.
That one day in the kitchen changed my life. In class, we learned to cook by finding a recipe and following its instructions exactly. We were rewarded for this good behavior by getting a meal and a good grade. In my grandma’s world, we were getting into relationship with the food. Feeling it. Getting to know it. Learning how it wanted to be cooked. I wasn’t even allowed to put on the apron until I was in relationship with my grandma—until I knew what cigarettes she liked to smoke and how she wanted her toilet bowl cleaned. Now I was getting into relationship with the money, discovering how it wanted to be kneaded.
My grandma was teaching me the most important lesson of cooking, but also of living: anything you really get into relationship with will reveal its secrets to you. All you have to do is stand in the kitchen with an open mind and heart, recognizing the honor of cooking food for your family. The recipe will come.This is a lesson I have never forgotten. It was the lesson of learning the difference between cooking as a science and cooking as an art. In science, we know that you make a cake by mixing together sugar and flour and eggs. You start from a position of knowledge—from a well-tested recipe—and you follow its rules until you have a cake. But for Grandma, the process started with a question: how does this particular cake want to be put together? These approaches come from two entirely different worlds. The first is the world of science—the science of cooking, but also of living. You take these rules, you apply them, and assuming you do it all right, the result is pretty much guaranteed. The second is where you begin to move into the art of living. You don’t know where you’re going and the results aren’t guaranteed. You can give every single thing you have and not achieve the outcome you were hoping for. But what you do achieve is the experience of intimate relationship. You open yourself, and the answers come through you. You find that you know things you never knew before. You discover that a masterpiece doesn’t actually require you to master anything at all. It simply requires you to feel, to listen, and to trust yourself. That’s art.
Ill met by moonlight
the curious weaver
sets her beckoning traps
she moves gracefully
letting her newly spun tapestry
guide her
towards the other end of the wooden doorway
pulse
movement
the web shakes whilst entangling its first victim
its mistress continues her delicate dance
as the other side is reached
she shrieks
as a shadow-hidden creature
much bigger then herself
tears her and her beautiful work
down
down
down
We sit with our food,
sharing it all sans hesitate.
This little family I made.
Alone is what
I imagine alternate.
I shrink back.
The people who don’t want this
I respect but do not understand.
This is the only reason.
i saved you from a black widow sir
i do not recall your name
we hammered away on the doorframe and i saw it on your glove
i yelled and you yelled and i smacked it away
we were 4 hours from any hospital