The Cradle Board

The kitchen table was where my mother taught 
me about the world. No,
it wasn’t, because
there was no kitchen table.

She always cooked outside, 
close to a wall, with firewood.
Until one day the wind brought down 
the fence on her back.

After the bricks came hard on her, 
she disappeared into the rubble. 
Her back held bruises.
It was father who pulled her out.

See, the fence was rebuilt,
and because it loved my mother’s back,
as I must have as a child, fell on her again. 
She relived that first horror.

Sometimes, in a nightmare
flowers are chasing me down a slope, 
waving kitchen knives, yelling
Why didn’t you do something?

I want to revisit my childhood 
in the voguish suburb of Minna 
where the house had flowers 
and the flowers had no knives.

In this version of the memory,
the fence is the most odious man I know 
at the kitchen table, eating soursop 
injected with rat poison.

Read more from Issue 18.1.