As fall brings us new winds and heralds change, we’re sitting with “After ‘listing (v), 2013′” by Chimwemwe Undi from our upcoming Room 47.4 Full Circle now available for pre-order!
“After ‘listing (v), 2013′”
by Chimwemwe Undi
The trouble is I was nineteen, and no exception,
resigned to writing about death: my looming own
or ours, unceasing. I was resigned to screaming,
to brevity, to a knowing acquired like language
grammar mapped onto some inborn faculty,
a prerequisite to speech. I used to keep vigil
and a vigil candle by the door, and when I went
my friends were there. I read that poem
to white people on the West Coast, wet-eyed
and reaching. I took a Greyhound to Moose Jaw,
Saskatchewan, and I read that poem
for drink tickets in a room I could not leave alone.
I wish I never wrote it. It is hard to end up a body,
so I started with a joke. The poem tried, and failed.
It, and by “it” I mean “I,” tried to do
what only death could, and then only televised
and then only briefly—the air rent, broadcast,
then a pellucid reckoning, the grim momentum
that ends without apology, with a kente cloth
banner on a LinkedIn account. I knew
something then I don’t know now.
I believed it so much and now,
God, I can’t remember.
Find more dream-like pieces that ask what non-linear stories do we have to tell? in Room 47.4 Full Circle.
Header image: photo of Chimwemwe Undi by Imalka Nilmalgoda.
