Relatively cheap, and oversweet, and yet I take one,
place it full inside my mouth.
A drone the fuck inside a beige and cuboid house
and through a loving mother’s skull
and through the soul of us.
A praline in the neat shape of a prawn,
its roof-of-mouth-fit, cocoa, sugar
mixed as blood might mix with mud
or bone with rubble,
but that little rush of acid, burn of sick,
the sort a husband and a daughter get
on seeing Mother macerated.
“Would you like another?”
“Yes, a seahorse.” It’s the father bears the young.
“You want a third one and a fourth one?”
“Yes, of course.”
{TO READ MORE FROM ISSUE 43, THE AFRICAN LITERARY HUSTLE, PURCHASE IT HERE).}
Stephen Derwent Partington is married into Kenya, and authored the collection SMS & Face to Face (Phoenix, Kenya). His How to Euthanise a Cactus (Cinnamon Press, 2010) was one of the Africa Report’s “Best Books of the Year from Africa,” and features numerous poems on Kenya’s post-election violence. Stephen’s academic papers on Kenyan literature have appeared in refereed journals. He is presently editing an anthology of Anglophone Kenyan poetry since the fall of Moi in 2003.
