& other poems by Afia Ansong 

I turn

every visit to the country
into a song

I sing

of my grandmother’s hometown

I sing

and climb to Aburi mountains

I tell my friends

the foreigners about the titles my grandmother
held, she is Nana

no longer

but should we destool this queen who is now gone?

I turn

every visit to the country
into a song

I sing

of my grandmother’s hometown

I sing

and climb to Aburi mountains

I tell my friends

the foreigners about the titles my grandmother
held, she is Nana

no longer

but should we destool this queen who is now gone?

PECKING

This city is for early risers: the chickens, goats, idols, the preachers
who carry a box for coins, and the bread seller. The dogs are exhausted
from howling from dusk. They are beaten down by the sun
like lovers found by a widow in her bed instead of their own.
She shouts thieves, but they come out giggling
and she is reminded that it is her husband that is dead
and not the jokes of lovers. I tell you about the dogs again
when I see the way one drags herself beneath a car loading
passengers for shade–no one is to blame for humidity
domesticating the wild.

The woman who peddles fresh bread, tea bread, has practiced her call
at home first before beginning her stroll. Behind my house is
a hill she has mastered for the past three years. Because she owns
this route, I hear of no other woman seeking to sell what she trades
on a make-shift wooden board. You do not ask a woman if her goods
are fresh: she sizes me up and down and says with her eyes if you won’t
buy you can go and I know that even if it is not fresh, someone else
will buy it. Like a whistle, she shouts, yees tea bread and drags the yes,
not as a tune of affirmation but a song, we must sing as the lord of tea bread.

The bread we have made porridge for which bubbles in a bowl on the table
—the one we will fry in the frying pan and not dehydrate in a toaster.
When she hears your response which is the lord of tea bread not I am here
she finds you like a lost child and you eagerly rise to meet the soft flower of earth.
She picks it with her hand, and though wonder where hands have been
where these hands will go, you say, the heat will deliver us all from death.
It is not the routine of the woman that surprises you,
but that of the area chicken and her chicks, running around as if their days
are not numbered, knowing where to call home and whom to call
butcher. The feathers of the one you encounter at the bridge are bloom
worthy, if it were a petal during spring, you would stop to look at it
and say things like what a beautiful petal but this one moves and pecks
and runs. At the melody of the morning, the chicks follow their mother
crossing gutters eating left over from the grass, mixing greetings with their
Peers—the goats, the flies, the cows, and new to me now, the crows.

Like clockwork, like God opening his windows to peak
eagerly at the praise we bring, I come to the gutter where I see chick,
old enough to be a toddler how long will chickens live anyway,
wait at the top of the gutter I say to it jump, jump, and it stares at me
and another chicken who has wasted no time and won’t return,
after all , this city is for the early bird. I leave it. I leave the chick
stranded on the call of a mother who is yet to arrive.

Bio
Afia Ansong is the author of three chapbooks: Black Ballad (Bull City Press, 2022), Try Kissing God (Akashic, 2020), and American Mercy (Finishing Line Press, 2019). Her writings have appeared in the Cincinnati Review, Prairie Schooner, Four Way Review, Maine Review, and other journals. She is the founder of The Adinkra Projects which provides poetry workshops and supports emerging Ghanaian writers, and an Assistant Professor at the University of Rhode Island.