Girl B

included in New-Generation African Poets: A Chapbook Box Set (Nne)

Akaschic Books

Girl B is a probing, thoughtful, and quietly exhilarating debut. I use the word quietly with a little reservation, as these are not slight poems: Bulley’s ambition and reach is impressive and she makes her point in a manner that is enviably subtle yet direct.

Karen McCarthy Woolf, from the preface

Luna

By sleeping in the dark, said Louise,
a girl realigns her chemicals according
to the clock face of old. With a pair of heavy curtains

and a thermometer, she maps her inbuilt
almanac to a graph and then divines, from this,
the times when she is most magical. This dreamtime

troubles the veil between worlds, incites visions,
can slam oceans against coastlines
like jealous lovers. Man, let a girl feel this amber sphere

just once, and she’ll forget what she heard about God
and her body; seeing what difference is left, knowing
how books have burned over both. Science, too:

brutal and unforgiving—until it got the eclipse on camera:
the follicle exploding like bubble wrap,
the ballooned egg in release,

until the window for conception slams shut
faster than Pandora’s trinket box, or the door of an aircraft,
One small step for man, one giant leap,

but when us girls were at school, we spoke of our own landings
plainly. If at all, as weeds, as inconvenient blossomings,
marooning the flowerbed, claiming what wanted

only to be good, clean fun, leaving
a crimson imprint after slipping in, noiseless, uncalled for,
unnamed, through the night, like a new moon.

“Luna,” by Victoria Adukwei Bulley