s w i f t s  &  s l o w s: a quarterly of crisscrossings

Flightless Birds Gather At Darkest Hours
 Kofi Forson & Nehal El-Hadi

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I am an anti-eater, tongue taster. I wake up from the dead, body of Sandra Bland, levitating.
I go where displaced heroes of hypocrisy go, count heads at after-hours watering holes.

Who are wolves among us, here to push our gangsta weight, crown wrestlers and thieves?
In this is our honor of country; we bleed money into our pockets, if by gofer or gullible saint.

On a land where people park their lives by roadsides without tires, I claim a brother or two.
A kingdom that God made; a Queen called King would lay her body down, map of the world.

Desert storms begin with a few grains. The only home I acknowledge is covered in dust and I
can’t tell where it is any more. I’ve got these memories and they’re shifty too. You can’t draw a
straight line in the sand. The first thing I remember is white sun blue sky. The last thing I
remember is your hot breath on my neck and I start to choke. It took five of us that day. She ruled
without a king. The sun will not apologise.

Consider the secretary bird: it captures its prey by stomping on it, thick leathery talons
crunching bones. Stunning. Large wings outstretched. Legs for days. I’m mesmerised by these
creatures who can fly but don’t, because they need so much space for takeoff.

What is a map but a fiction? Now tell me something I know.

With our voices we pass for white. Not of this country but we count as the ones who
bend more ways than a willow in the wind, confounded by colorlessness of skin.

It took us a thousand years to be free, still haunted by waves of the ocean, whether with
fishermen or hundred many men on slave ships. Water begs a question; who are we?

Why are we here? Where we first set feet, we catapulted onto land. The world inside remains
fore-fathered. These mysterious birds, flightless, gather at darkest hours.

What we see in ourselves, nomads on deserted courtyards fenced in. We pick apart luggage to
behold beloved jewel.  A life as this, thrown into cages, several at a time.

We fight for breath, hands at the throat. Night comes like prison guard, by death or evil.
Tomorrow, these memories will be damage, trauma breaking the cold morning silence.

Tell me more about you. Who do you love and who loves you? Why the difference? Tell me what you feel like in the morning, and how you feel about salt and water. Talk to me about what you know, what you want me to know. I won’t be here for long, and I’ll come back.

There’s bass in your bones. Does it weigh you down? So many questions.

Me, I’m black, red, yellow, brown. Dust and fire. Things I have felt:
Color of human flesh, black figure on canvas, muddied blue-green, red, burnt umber.

Faces I’ve seen from underneath an umbrella were phantoms painting skulls and bones.

This is how we, Afro-Cosmo-Neopolitan-Cypher, throw stones, make history.

Wounded, beheaded at birth, we grew another. My dear giant, kill softly these sounds.

Voices call me back, time when I guested as ghost, I was lemon in your saltwater soup.

I am devoured, delivered, made new on China plate, halved, whole, skewered.

Wet things, moisture in your mouth as you taste. Like torture in a fallopian tube,

we all come out the same, monster baby hungry for tit, toy-boy, girl-glue, milk.

My mother the sky, I climbed a hill to get closer to you. There I stood

looking up. I felt a drop, what you called tear, washed me clean from head to toe.

Again. The sun, full of life, does not apologise.

Haunted, and I drank a whole glass of holy water. Ghosts don’t die, they multiply into other
bodies, fragments of trauma embedding themselves into newly-opened wounds. I don’t know who
did what to whom, but I know what is done to me when voices raise and doors slam.

Marking time, that’s all I do. One mark after the other after the other is a never-ending chain of moments and some of them are more intense than others, some marks deeper than the others.

I am the desert and I am made of sand that hides itself as skin blood and bones. I shapeshift the
same way that sand dunes move and transform landscapes, sometimes slowly. I am a desiccated
thing.

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Kofi Fosu Forson is a writer who identifies as para-meta-modernist and whose writing explores subjects of #posttrauma, #postshock, and a black identity beyond the realm of blackness.

Nehal El-Hadi is a writer and researcher whose work explores the relationships between the body (racialised, gendered), place (urban, virtual), and technology (internet, health). They decided to collaborate after their mutual friend, the performer and video artist Jessica Karuhanga, sent Nehal an excerpt from Kofi’s blog, Black Cocteau. Kofi’s writing intrigued Nehal, and she began corresponding with him online. After reflecting on the video for “Peau de Chagrin / Bleu de Nuit” by the Belgian/Congolais hip hop artist Baloji, Kofi and Nehal started writing together about innate Blackness, life/love/death.