In the lead up to Issue VI’s submission deadline, our Editor is sharing six poems which she believes speak to the themes of courage and the symbolic serpent, as well as being linked to Li Ji’s heroism. In preparing your submission (whether it be poetry, prose, photography or art), feel free to be inspired by these pieces.
Patrilineal by Caleb Femi
my father lives with his head inside a blood orange
he, unassuming in frame, would tell me
of the fathers who came before me
how his father died after he touched his father’s beard
this is one of two things I know of my forefathers
when he would beat me I would study him in action, belt
swinging like a skipping rope from his shoulder to my arm
or back or buttocks belly he would beat the part of
himself in me beating some unhatched omen away
away away & I performed
sobbing to appease his urge to exorcise
my mother & siblings are Arsenal fans it is only I
who choose Man Utd my father’s club I hoped that he
would see me the way a teammate sees another on the grass
at dinner it is always a winter night & we serve portions
of our faces our brown eyes prickly & gorgeous
we speak only of matches & the Word
once when there was not football to survive
the silence I told him I dreamt a prophet
& a began to prophesy every unescaped thing in his throat
things that made him afraid of him & me for knowing &
speaking it all out into the world when I no longer knew
what to say I coughed up a half-eaten eyeball & told him it
was just my hay fever playing up again.
Less than two weeks remain to submit to Issue VI: Li Ji (courage and the serpent).
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