The Newborn’s Swim
After Ife Olatona

‘’here/ where the water breaks/ where the shore lies/where the world opens/ here is the cord/ no backstroke/ here is the blood’’ – Ife Olatona

& there where darkness lies / by the smiles of the doctors/ you’ll know that being born in my country or anywhere nowadays is a sin
& i am smiling / the room is filled with some things we sometimes interpret as love
their eyes on me made me starved for death / the loss of too /much blood from my mother taught me that this world is a battlefield
the time it took / for me my head to be out / made me realize that nothing comes here easily like surviving /i am jealous of babies that die in labor 

OdetoTheKitchen&OtherThings

i wrote my first poem in my mother’s kitchen three years ago, frustrated about the clogged sink. 
i have vowed to worship anything that may sound like our kitchen door
after all, a god’s voice is found in everything that moans 
i have wished so many things like the sound of water flooding the sink, or wet lips of the faucet
  i have been fattened by the sound & images they create
today i will be filled with air like my sister’s balloon 

  my mother says one day i will get tire of them i have drank her alertness like the last juice left open   often i have pleasured myself trying to clog my throat like the kitchen sink that keeps clogging 

Jeremy T. Karn

Karn, Jeremy. T
Poet / Storyteller
Monrovia, Liberia