CHIYUMA ELLIOTT on
Medbh McGuckian The Sofa Do not be angry if I tell you your letter stayed unopened on my table for several days. If you were friend enough to believe me, I was about to start writing at any moment; my mind was savagely made up, like a serious sofa moved under a north window. My heart, alas, is not the calmest of places. Still it is not my heart that needs replacing: and my books seem real enough to me, my disasters, my surrenders, all my loss. . . . Since I was child enough to forget that you loathe poetry, you ask for some-- about nature, greenery, insects, and, of course, the sun—surely that would be to open an already open window? To celebrate the impudence of flowers? If I could interest you instead in his large, gentle stares, how his soft shirt is the inside of pleasure to me, why I must wear white for him, imagine he no longer trembles when I approach, no longer buys me flowers for my name day. . . . But I spread on like a house, I begin to scatter to a tiny to-and-fro at odds with the wear on my threshold. Somewhere a curtain rising wonders where I am, my books sleep, pretending to forget me. |
Chiyuma Elliott is an Associate Professor of African American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Her scholarly work focuses on poetry and the Harlem Renaissance. A former Stegner Fellow, Chiyuma’s poems have appeared in the African American Review, Callaloo, the Notre Dame Review, the PN Review, and other journals. She has received fellowships from the American Philosophical Society, Cave Canem, and the Vermont Studio Center. She is the author of four books of poetry, most recently Blue in Green (2021).
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