COLLABORATIONS
DISMEMBER THE NIGHT
(Dianne Bowen)
CUSHION BELLES
(Gaynor Sweeney)
(c) Gaynor Evelyn Sweeney, The Enlightenment - Les Cushion Belles (Live Art), Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool (UK) 2004
FLIGHTLESS BIRDS GATHER AT DARKEST HOURS
(Nehal El-Hadi)
s w i f t s & s l o w s: a quarterly of crisscrossings
Flightless Birds Gather At Darkest Hours
Kofi Forson & Nehal El-Hadi
←back or next→
I am an anti-eater, tongue taster. I wake up from the dead, body of Sandra Bland, levitating.
I go where displaced heroes of hypocrisy go, count heads at after-hours watering holes.
Who are wolves among us, here to push our gangsta weight, crown wrestlers and thieves?
In this is our honor of country; we bleed money into our pockets, if by gofer or gullible saint.
On a land where people park their lives by roadsides without tires, I claim a brother or two.
A kingdom that God made; a Queen called King would lay her body down, map of the world.
Desert storms begin with a few grains. The only home I acknowledge is covered in dust and I
can’t tell where it is any more. I’ve got these memories and they’re shifty too. You can’t draw a
straight line in the sand. The first thing I remember is white sun blue sky. The last thing I
remember is your hot breath on my neck and I start to choke. It took five of us that day. She ruled
without a king. The sun will not apologise.
Consider the secretary bird: it captures its prey by stomping on it, thick leathery talons
crunching bones. Stunning. Large wings outstretched. Legs for days. I’m mesmerised by these
creatures who can fly but don’t, because they need so much space for takeoff.
What is a map but a fiction? Now tell me something I know.
With our voices we pass for white. Not of this country but we count as the ones who
bend more ways than a willow in the wind, confounded by colorlessness of skin.
It took us a thousand years to be free, still haunted by waves of the ocean, whether with
fishermen or hundred many men on slave ships. Water begs a question; who are we?
Why are we here? Where we first set feet, we catapulted onto land. The world inside remains
fore-fathered. These mysterious birds, flightless, gather at darkest hours.
What we see in ourselves, nomads on deserted courtyards fenced in. We pick apart luggage to
behold beloved jewel. A life as this, thrown into cages, several at a time.
We fight for breath, hands at the throat. Night comes like prison guard, by death or evil.
Tomorrow, these memories will be damage, trauma breaking the cold morning silence.
Tell me more about you. Who do you love and who loves you? Why the difference? Tell me what you feel like in the morning, and how you feel about salt and water. Talk to me about what you know, what you want me to know. I won’t be here for long, and I’ll come back.
There’s bass in your bones. Does it weigh you down? So many questions.
Me, I’m black, red, yellow, brown. Dust and fire. Things I have felt:
Color of human flesh, black figure on canvas, muddied blue-green, red, burnt umber.
Faces I’ve seen from underneath an umbrella were phantoms painting skulls and bones.
This is how we, Afro-Cosmo-Neopolitan-Cypher, throw stones, make history.
Wounded, beheaded at birth, we grew another. My dear giant, kill softly these sounds.
Voices call me back, time when I guested as ghost, I was lemon in your saltwater soup.
I am devoured, delivered, made new on China plate, halved, whole, skewered.
Wet things, moisture in your mouth as you taste. Like torture in a fallopian tube,
we all come out the same, monster baby hungry for tit, toy-boy, girl-glue, milk.
My mother the sky, I climbed a hill to get closer to you. There I stood
looking up. I felt a drop, what you called tear, washed me clean from head to toe.
Again. The sun, full of life, does not apologise.
Haunted, and I drank a whole glass of holy water. Ghosts don’t die, they multiply into other
bodies, fragments of trauma embedding themselves into newly-opened wounds. I don’t know who
did what to whom, but I know what is done to me when voices raise and doors slam.
Marking time, that’s all I do. One mark after the other after the other is a never-ending chain of moments and some of them are more intense than others, some marks deeper than the others.
I am the desert and I am made of sand that hides itself as skin blood and bones. I shapeshift the
same way that sand dunes move and transform landscapes, sometimes slowly. I am a desiccated
thing.
←back or next→
Kofi Fosu Forson is a writer who identifies as para-meta-modernist and whose writing explores subjects of #posttrauma, #postshock, and a black identity beyond the realm of blackness.
Nehal El-Hadi is a writer and researcher whose work explores the relationships between the body (racialised, gendered), place (urban, virtual), and technology (internet, health). They decided to collaborate after their mutual friend, the performer and video artist Jessica Karuhanga, sent Nehal an excerpt from Kofi’s blog, Black Cocteau. Kofi’s writing intrigued Nehal, and she began corresponding with him online. After reflecting on the video for “Peau de Chagrin / Bleu de Nuit” by the Belgian/Congolais hip hop artist Baloji, Kofi and Nehal started writing together about innate Blackness, life/love/death.
POMPIDOU
(Renee LoBue)
s w i f t s & s l o w s: a quarterly of crisscrossings
Pompidou
Renée LoBue & Kofi Forson
←back or next→
I Came To Planet Earth To Be 101,000% Who I Really Am
L’Age d’Or, ma petite symptôme – pink corolla bejewelled at heart
Never one to digress from our shindig;Fashionista, you play the part
La belle bleue femme, La Russe – spinning, a decadent dance record
Aura of the room, many interpretations of your nom de plume; Bedford
What histories beget this moment – Maria Braun, veiled, la robe blanche
Trails of flower petals at door, remembrances of marriages, rich or poor
With flair you crouch on floor, dare to pronounce in French, insouciance
Song you sing, battle hymns, reasons we wear disco dresses; love or sin
Night is the wing – that money can take us from Moscow to Marseille
Drip diamonds, paint the evening with rubies, like star-studded skies
From shadows we merge, Donatella and her suicide king, at Palisades
Chasing after merry-go round, we sashay, sparks and colors for eyes
Shaking Our Heads
Earle of Pearls, on 40 dates; 40 wakes couldn’t save Paloma’s parceled heart. Ardor less spent at courting thieves; made present in gifting treasures stolen.
Pleasure packages via postal service; like exploratory heart surgery, blood sport
Emotional blood, wept as in tears, manner of complaint; what’s lacking in love.
Hopelessly money inspires malcontentment; whiskey breath for lavender scent.
Her moist temperament for his charisma; cracking of egg shells, violent-red yolk
Voluptuousness of silk, pours over skin; cosmopolitan flesh, muscularly-boned.
Optimal distraction, what led to divorce, separation from high art, love courtship
Go Vegetarian
El Guapo waters land with masculinity for birds to see.
Barbarism; fields of San Juan; rancheros herd caballos.
Animals hunger for air; his breath as vast as bluest ocean.
Sky overlooks his wealth; hedonism at the many villas.
“Preparar la concina para la comida”; feast on Lenguas.
Face of the republic, lives are lost, government slaughters pigs.
He reigns supreme; hires servants to serve chuletas, costillas.
Compounds are free from warlords, wretched, thirsting for blood
El Despiadado, sought riches in family; would kill to save a son.
He sends his very own abroad to learn ways of water.
Heart like an engine; here, men do push-ups, lift weights.
American hombres ricos, pulling strings in the material world
Their martini lunches replaced by dining on wheat and grass
Clock work; day traders; at night, hot-wired, living the life
La vida rica: late night limousines, Caribbean Queens.
Hey Babe, Take A Walk On The … Fact That We’re All Repressing Our Emotions
By divine, I mean luxuriousness in you becoming known, new, nuanced.
San Fernando gods welcoming; their walls whitened, made tactile, trendy.
Each moment these hours await your return; life spent on hotel mattresses.
Call back the years, when sounds outside the window were machine music.
Factories, not farms: how you wished for a pony ride, trail through a garden.
Awaken then; world beckons; of its summer grass you’ll walk picking flowers.
Daffodil in your hair; like geese walking grounds of park, you collect sunshine.
Loaded, your body having undertaken this trek, put to use those wise words.
Wisdom that resonated within the air, felt ready-made for song, melody, tune.
On stage, housed before the band are those represented as family, cult, sign.
They answer to a goddess-call, each note hangs up to ceiling, golden design.
Sooner, you wish for feeling on your mouth of your favorite ice-cream spoon.
Come back; wash away stress of that Sunday dress, bought with tiny tears.
Come back; sleep well-fed; knife and fork dinner, to éclair, welcome you home
←back or next→
Collages: Renée LoBue. Poetry: Kofi Fosu Forson.
Renée LoBue is a musician, performance and visual artist. Best known as the singer for the band, Elk City, she recently embarked on a 2nd musical endeavor: Flowers of America. Dividing time dancing between mediums, she explores the possibility of the Self via music, analog collage and video art.
Kofi Fosu Forson is writer, poet and playwright. His Blog, BLACK COCTEAU explores matters of sexual, gender, and ethnic politics in modern society, culture and arts. His current poetry manuscript, Ghost of Brother Blackburn, deals with his transformative experience from race, family dystopia and rock and roll.
(Dianne Bowen)
CUSHION BELLES
(Gaynor Sweeney)
(c) Gaynor Evelyn Sweeney, The Enlightenment - Les Cushion Belles (Live Art), Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool (UK) 2004
FLIGHTLESS BIRDS GATHER AT DARKEST HOURS
(Nehal El-Hadi)
s w i f t s & s l o w s: a quarterly of crisscrossings
Flightless Birds Gather At Darkest Hours
Kofi Forson & Nehal El-Hadi
←back or next→
I am an anti-eater, tongue taster. I wake up from the dead, body of Sandra Bland, levitating.
I go where displaced heroes of hypocrisy go, count heads at after-hours watering holes.
Who are wolves among us, here to push our gangsta weight, crown wrestlers and thieves?
In this is our honor of country; we bleed money into our pockets, if by gofer or gullible saint.
On a land where people park their lives by roadsides without tires, I claim a brother or two.
A kingdom that God made; a Queen called King would lay her body down, map of the world.
Desert storms begin with a few grains. The only home I acknowledge is covered in dust and I
can’t tell where it is any more. I’ve got these memories and they’re shifty too. You can’t draw a
straight line in the sand. The first thing I remember is white sun blue sky. The last thing I
remember is your hot breath on my neck and I start to choke. It took five of us that day. She ruled
without a king. The sun will not apologise.
Consider the secretary bird: it captures its prey by stomping on it, thick leathery talons
crunching bones. Stunning. Large wings outstretched. Legs for days. I’m mesmerised by these
creatures who can fly but don’t, because they need so much space for takeoff.
What is a map but a fiction? Now tell me something I know.
With our voices we pass for white. Not of this country but we count as the ones who
bend more ways than a willow in the wind, confounded by colorlessness of skin.
It took us a thousand years to be free, still haunted by waves of the ocean, whether with
fishermen or hundred many men on slave ships. Water begs a question; who are we?
Why are we here? Where we first set feet, we catapulted onto land. The world inside remains
fore-fathered. These mysterious birds, flightless, gather at darkest hours.
What we see in ourselves, nomads on deserted courtyards fenced in. We pick apart luggage to
behold beloved jewel. A life as this, thrown into cages, several at a time.
We fight for breath, hands at the throat. Night comes like prison guard, by death or evil.
Tomorrow, these memories will be damage, trauma breaking the cold morning silence.
Tell me more about you. Who do you love and who loves you? Why the difference? Tell me what you feel like in the morning, and how you feel about salt and water. Talk to me about what you know, what you want me to know. I won’t be here for long, and I’ll come back.
There’s bass in your bones. Does it weigh you down? So many questions.
Me, I’m black, red, yellow, brown. Dust and fire. Things I have felt:
Color of human flesh, black figure on canvas, muddied blue-green, red, burnt umber.
Faces I’ve seen from underneath an umbrella were phantoms painting skulls and bones.
This is how we, Afro-Cosmo-Neopolitan-Cypher, throw stones, make history.
Wounded, beheaded at birth, we grew another. My dear giant, kill softly these sounds.
Voices call me back, time when I guested as ghost, I was lemon in your saltwater soup.
I am devoured, delivered, made new on China plate, halved, whole, skewered.
Wet things, moisture in your mouth as you taste. Like torture in a fallopian tube,
we all come out the same, monster baby hungry for tit, toy-boy, girl-glue, milk.
My mother the sky, I climbed a hill to get closer to you. There I stood
looking up. I felt a drop, what you called tear, washed me clean from head to toe.
Again. The sun, full of life, does not apologise.
Haunted, and I drank a whole glass of holy water. Ghosts don’t die, they multiply into other
bodies, fragments of trauma embedding themselves into newly-opened wounds. I don’t know who
did what to whom, but I know what is done to me when voices raise and doors slam.
Marking time, that’s all I do. One mark after the other after the other is a never-ending chain of moments and some of them are more intense than others, some marks deeper than the others.
I am the desert and I am made of sand that hides itself as skin blood and bones. I shapeshift the
same way that sand dunes move and transform landscapes, sometimes slowly. I am a desiccated
thing.
←back or next→
Kofi Fosu Forson is a writer who identifies as para-meta-modernist and whose writing explores subjects of #posttrauma, #postshock, and a black identity beyond the realm of blackness.
Nehal El-Hadi is a writer and researcher whose work explores the relationships between the body (racialised, gendered), place (urban, virtual), and technology (internet, health). They decided to collaborate after their mutual friend, the performer and video artist Jessica Karuhanga, sent Nehal an excerpt from Kofi’s blog, Black Cocteau. Kofi’s writing intrigued Nehal, and she began corresponding with him online. After reflecting on the video for “Peau de Chagrin / Bleu de Nuit” by the Belgian/Congolais hip hop artist Baloji, Kofi and Nehal started writing together about innate Blackness, life/love/death.
POMPIDOU
(Renee LoBue)
s w i f t s & s l o w s: a quarterly of crisscrossings
Pompidou
Renée LoBue & Kofi Forson
←back or next→
I Came To Planet Earth To Be 101,000% Who I Really Am
L’Age d’Or, ma petite symptôme – pink corolla bejewelled at heart
Never one to digress from our shindig;Fashionista, you play the part
La belle bleue femme, La Russe – spinning, a decadent dance record
Aura of the room, many interpretations of your nom de plume; Bedford
What histories beget this moment – Maria Braun, veiled, la robe blanche
Trails of flower petals at door, remembrances of marriages, rich or poor
With flair you crouch on floor, dare to pronounce in French, insouciance
Song you sing, battle hymns, reasons we wear disco dresses; love or sin
Night is the wing – that money can take us from Moscow to Marseille
Drip diamonds, paint the evening with rubies, like star-studded skies
From shadows we merge, Donatella and her suicide king, at Palisades
Chasing after merry-go round, we sashay, sparks and colors for eyes
Shaking Our Heads
Earle of Pearls, on 40 dates; 40 wakes couldn’t save Paloma’s parceled heart. Ardor less spent at courting thieves; made present in gifting treasures stolen.
Pleasure packages via postal service; like exploratory heart surgery, blood sport
Emotional blood, wept as in tears, manner of complaint; what’s lacking in love.
Hopelessly money inspires malcontentment; whiskey breath for lavender scent.
Her moist temperament for his charisma; cracking of egg shells, violent-red yolk
Voluptuousness of silk, pours over skin; cosmopolitan flesh, muscularly-boned.
Optimal distraction, what led to divorce, separation from high art, love courtship
Go Vegetarian
El Guapo waters land with masculinity for birds to see.
Barbarism; fields of San Juan; rancheros herd caballos.
Animals hunger for air; his breath as vast as bluest ocean.
Sky overlooks his wealth; hedonism at the many villas.
“Preparar la concina para la comida”; feast on Lenguas.
Face of the republic, lives are lost, government slaughters pigs.
He reigns supreme; hires servants to serve chuletas, costillas.
Compounds are free from warlords, wretched, thirsting for blood
El Despiadado, sought riches in family; would kill to save a son.
He sends his very own abroad to learn ways of water.
Heart like an engine; here, men do push-ups, lift weights.
American hombres ricos, pulling strings in the material world
Their martini lunches replaced by dining on wheat and grass
Clock work; day traders; at night, hot-wired, living the life
La vida rica: late night limousines, Caribbean Queens.
Hey Babe, Take A Walk On The … Fact That We’re All Repressing Our Emotions
By divine, I mean luxuriousness in you becoming known, new, nuanced.
San Fernando gods welcoming; their walls whitened, made tactile, trendy.
Each moment these hours await your return; life spent on hotel mattresses.
Call back the years, when sounds outside the window were machine music.
Factories, not farms: how you wished for a pony ride, trail through a garden.
Awaken then; world beckons; of its summer grass you’ll walk picking flowers.
Daffodil in your hair; like geese walking grounds of park, you collect sunshine.
Loaded, your body having undertaken this trek, put to use those wise words.
Wisdom that resonated within the air, felt ready-made for song, melody, tune.
On stage, housed before the band are those represented as family, cult, sign.
They answer to a goddess-call, each note hangs up to ceiling, golden design.
Sooner, you wish for feeling on your mouth of your favorite ice-cream spoon.
Come back; wash away stress of that Sunday dress, bought with tiny tears.
Come back; sleep well-fed; knife and fork dinner, to éclair, welcome you home
←back or next→
Collages: Renée LoBue. Poetry: Kofi Fosu Forson.
Renée LoBue is a musician, performance and visual artist. Best known as the singer for the band, Elk City, she recently embarked on a 2nd musical endeavor: Flowers of America. Dividing time dancing between mediums, she explores the possibility of the Self via music, analog collage and video art.
Kofi Fosu Forson is writer, poet and playwright. His Blog, BLACK COCTEAU explores matters of sexual, gender, and ethnic politics in modern society, culture and arts. His current poetry manuscript, Ghost of Brother Blackburn, deals with his transformative experience from race, family dystopia and rock and roll.
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