Poetry

Chain Of Supply

by Benedict Hangiriza

Geological past shapes biological present.
— Blake de Pastino

sun-charred pits bloated with
bodies, sacks of bright-turquoise
shales. This biblical toil is all that
remains for progress' expanding
mouth. Each phone, a remote
gulag, each battery emaciated limbs,
atomized to electrolyte. Here eats the young
and the old, mother in close-ups returns to girl,
returns before miscarriages, before her
father's blood writhes a
cleft palate down the family tree to this
malleable, coltish frame of hills peppered
with bones like acres of rotting fruit.
Here, the immovable shroud of conflict,
the kind a féticheur's ear refuses its charged
cochlea, scours this land like the innards of
a lokole drum. East and south, and north and
west, rename this stalling country an alias of
slavery. Here, alluvial-churned ghosts nudge
us forward, backward, where a sophist
representative denies the corpse
tally of dozens that find no bottom and empty into the
pliocene awaiting them as 35,000 grunts osmose
chests threaded with just sticks and straw.