Chain Of Supply
Photo: Dan Meyers
“Geological past shapes biological present” —Blake De Pastino
sun-charred pits bloated with
bodies, sacks of bright-turquoise
shales. This biblical toil of progress's
expanding mouth. Each phone, a remote
gulag, each battery emaciated limbs
atomized to electrolyte. Here eats young
and old. Mothers in close-ups return to girls,
return before miscarriages, before their
fathers’ blood writhes a
cleft palate down the family tree to this
malleable, coltish frame of hills peppered
with bones like acres of rotting
fruit. Here, the immovable shroud of conflict,
the kind a féticheur's ear refuses its charged
cochlea, scours this land like the innards of
a lokole drum. East and South and North and
West rename this stalling country an alias of
slavery. Here, alluvial-churned ghosts nudge
us forward, backward where a sophist
representative denies the corpse
tally of dozens that find no bottom and empty into the
pliocene awaiting them as 35,000 grunts osmose
chests threaded with sticks and straws.
About the author
Benedict Hangiriza is a poet from Kampala Uganda. His poetry has so far been published in Swim Press, Kalahari Review and Writers Space Africa.
