Blood Ties
Grandma washes a piece of my cloth that is stained with blood
By the taps in the lawn.
Her eyes a blooming nightingale
Her lips a focused snarl
I have fallen from my ascent of the stairs
A slight graze that now leaks with warm blood
Clad in my nightgown, which tonight is simply a cloth rounding my body
She has cradled my left leg which bore the brunt of the fall,
kissed it
And now the cloth is moistened and rubbed against her palms with Omo
She recounts how she was never supposed to marry grandpa
She is Asante, he was Frafra
And some Asantes saw Frafras as beneath them as a lot of Frafras served menial tasks under them
So, her family said no.
It was a travesty, a dilution, a union unsacred.
Grandma sprinkles more Omo on the stained section of the cloth
Yet the blood stained on this cloth is proof that blood ties bore beyond ethnicity
Blood is red, the heart is red too.
Love is blood, hate is blood too.
I hear the pain in Grandma’s voice,
The subtle restraint, the glaring confusion cracking out her lips,
The crudeness of the whole familial exchange,
The bloody intensity of it, the stress of it,
that she would have to go through it,
to wring out love from her lover’s skin
They thought they just wanted to maintain their pure-blood race
Grandma coos, in her thick Akan accent that droops with a slight tremor
But they’ll never realize that when two lovers are reticent in their need of one another, because of norm, in public,
it never reveals that they’re unwilling to burn down the village, even to keep reticence.
Grandma’s body lurches, embroidering a determined look as she now begins rubbing the unstained sections of the cloth vigorously, occasionally smiling.
But trust your grandma never to remain reticent. For blood is also transcendence.
She burned the whole village down and still loved in the open, the rubble behind her a memory of resilience.
My eyes rove and brood over Grandma,
my nakedness against the night
And say, lips turned to the starless sky
Indeed, blood too is memory,
a consummation,
a christening.
there’s a reckoning
You need to cast your gaze across bloody stars, wind deeper into a trove of love
away from rumbling doves that perch atop feeble stars. You need to arrest your gaze,
feed your shuddering to floors that eat quake and quandary.
Sink into caked clouds and munch on granola bars and brazen pie.
Why not explore the bleak within this time? Is it trying to say something where it last hurt, recalibrate where it last sopped wet with loss?
Look to the rock from which you were helmed, never to friends that despised your gait
till you bathed in liquid gold, smiled with teeth that crushed Ballantine crystals, then they eyed with longing, restless to suck your anus.
Look to the power source. Look to God. Maybe He will spit a Promethian fire that will consume the hurt.
It’s hard to brave a storm when you leak with thick curdles of oiled maudlin. Yet take the first step! With the raging waves meeting the heavens in a sloppy wet kiss;
in the stillness, there’s a reckoning.
Tighten
Press hard upon the neck
Suck the life out of the ghastly being
This being first scooped tulips for you on your first meeting
This being winded into your body after the fifth date
And left you sore and giddy
This being paid for all your expenses
But after the second year
Began to smack you hard across the cheek
This being would crown your head with a thorn of slurs
Good-for-nothing, wasteland, stupid bitch, skunk,
You would swallow those words
As they struggled to find a home in your belly
You would tear into a million pieces
And disappear into the wind of memory
This being would trifle even further
He would bring harlots onto the marriage bed
And soil with his atrocities
This being would morph into a demon
Watching as you burnt in hell
As he declared you the harlot of harlots
The mouth of flame would widen, ravenous
As it scorched your peace whole
So when dawn kissed the darkness,
It happened,
You pressed hard upon his neck as he slept
And squeezed the beast out of him
God thought wrong when he fleshed out his clot of blood in the womb.
David Agyei-Yeboah is a Ghanaian artist whose work interrogates the relationship between text, sound and performance. He is currently searching for a publisher for his hybrid novel, OUR SPIRITS YEARN FOR HOME, a manuscript that uses the trauma of a Ghanaian male as leeway to explore the collective trauma of modern Ghana and the journey to healing and redemption. But hey, there are flashes of adventure and magical realism too. When he’s not obsessing over his creative process, like now – pardon his self-indulgence, lol – he is probably fixated on his piano or guitar, writing pop songs or maybe finding musicians that move him artistically. He’s stuck on Tay Iwar, for now – stuck on his gorgeous tone and experimental eccentricities. God knows who’s next. Social media: Instagram: @davidshaddai X & TikTok: @david_shaddai
Cocer photo credit: Adrien Olichon