Kei Vough Korede
RETURNING
At dawn, the train came to a halt.
You walked your body, heavy with denial & distance, upon the Brown face of the Earth.
Two girls with ponytails bounded out of nowhere in mirth— there, suddenly, like the spleen of
laughter, memories came back to you, unwhole, spun in a whorl of childhood.
Half drunk in the morning's glory—
You closed your eyes, inhaled the air that reduced you to a heavy moment of remembrance, an abysmal
into the closest kind of surrender, and fell at the feet of history.
You, this little patchwork of time.
You, this familiar stranger who has known the length of roads.
You, this recovered loss of Zion.
There's a bit of liquor to memories & it has led your feet, wobbly, to the gutters of your past, where
you are a child again.
Your father's voice, a whip raised against your mother's body.
Her body, a map of conflagrating histories burning with everything from the past.