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You are here: Home / 43 / I Am Offered a Praline While Syria is Bombed

I Am Offered a Praline While Syria is Bombed

43, Poetry by Stephen Derwent Partington

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.

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Call for Submissions: Special Issue on Iran

Call for submissions by Iranian women (trans & non-binary inclusive) writers. Learn more and submit your work here.

New Orleans Review is delighted to announce the publication of its first book, Interviews from the Edge: 50 Years of Conversations about Writing and Resistance
(Bloomsbury 2019).

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