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).