my parents’ first meeting in a refugee camp
he saw my mother in the scar-city-brown hair and yellow dusted-down dresswith lips too cracked to hold down a languageand he said: you can have some milkand she said: only if the tongue can tasteand he said: in the war desire isa bird face-to-face with glassand she said: i'm hungry for a homeand he said: even bones thirstand she said: my ankle is rusty from waitingand he said: pick the soles and follow meand she said: an undone shoelace canno she said: i'm looking for my fatherin every man—is he here?
Feature Date
- August 9, 2022
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Copyright © 2022 by Bhion Achimba.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Bhion Achimba is the pen name of the Nigerian writer Chibuihe Obi Achimba. He is a poet, essayist, and Founding-Editor of Dgëku Magazine. He served as the 2019 Harvard University Scholar At-Risk Fellow, a Visiting Poet in its English Department, and the 2020 Summer Visiting Artist at the Oregon Institute for Creative Research. Bhion has been awarded grants by PEN America, PEN International, Freedom House, and St. Botolph Club Foundation, which named him one of the 2021 Emerging Artists in New England. His writing has been published or forthcoming in The New York Times, The Paris Review, The Harvard Review, Poet Lore, Foreign Policy Magazine, Guernica Magazine, and several other prints and online journals. He teaches at Brown University.
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