Coconut Oil
Vatika bottle sits in the bathroom,
contents solidified by London’s night.
Mum microwaves it to a clear sap –
an ancestral ritual improvised.
She sits me down, braids unplaited,
drags plastic comb through my hair.
Ouch Mummy, Mummy not too hard!
Pretends my squeaks are not there.
Drip-drip onto my invisible scalp.
Grap-grip with the palms of her hand.
Rub-rub rub-rub taming flyaways.
Slap-slip onto the slick-dark of strands.
A soft scent, sweet and buttery, slippery
tinged with metallic sweat of my brow,
provokes questions in the playground,
Why do you smell so funny? How?
The powder-red shame of coconut oil
spray-paints itself onto my skin.
I delete it from life like a bad line of code,
no chance of it coming back in.
When suddenly, this hair oil that gave me such grief
comes back for wellbeing’s bright new age.
No longer smelling funny, a great white commodity
marked up for organic food shops. All the rage.
by Roshni Goyate, from the utterly wonderful collection of poems that is ‘Poetry Unbound: 50 Poems To Open Your World’ edited by Padraig O’ Tuama
What You Missed That Day You Were Absent from Fourth Grade
Mrs. Nelson explained how to stand still and listen
to the wind, how to find meaning in pumping gas,
how peeling potatoes can be a form of prayer. She took
questions on how not to feel lost in the dark.
After lunch she distributed worksheets
that covered ways to remember your grandfather’s
voice. Then the class discussed falling asleep
without feeling you had forgotten to do something else—
something important—and how to believe
the house you wake in is your home. This prompted
Mrs. Nelson to draw a chalkboard diagram detailing
how to chant the Psalms during cigarette breaks,
and how not to squirm for sound when your own thoughts
are all you hear; also, that you have enough.
The English lesson was that I am
is a complete sentence.
And just before the afternoon bell, she made the math equation
look easy. The one that proves that hundreds of questions,
and feeling cold, and all those nights spent looking
for whatever it was you lost, and one person
add up to something.
—Brad Aaron Modlin, ‘Everyone at This Party Has Two Names’ by Southeast Missouri State University Press