Take Me Back

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

Akashic Books

Nigerian-born Chekwube O. Danladi is, simply put, one of the truly exciting poets emerging today. I am already hungry to read a full collection of her poems, and especially keen to read her fifth collection, which, no doubt, will be heralded, as “the anxiously anticipated new work of one of our true legislators of the human experience.” It is fair to recognize the whimsy of hyperbole here, but I have imagined her future writing in light of the surety of continued work that this splendid chapbook collection, Take Me Back, represents.

Kwame Dawes, from the preface

Salt: Alum

You can touch me.
I’ve been so good. I have
been especially
still, all this time,
each of my palms
made a bed for your untucking,

me, the meal made
from reused chicken grease:
eased and always saying yes.
Gender is cunning;
the ruination
unwitting—

a stolen position.
I have been bent over.
The beast dug
out of me, the jewels.

Pleasure light pops
the eyes, obsidian sticks in the throat,
even this body doesn’t register.

The knuckles fold toward Lake Michigan.
The gut hardens.
Oxalate builds in the kidneys,
The tongue is a grateful peasant; for
a beating I can answer to a middle name.

“Salt: Alum,” by Chekwube Danladi