‘’where two or more black women are gathered to tell powerful stories, there is a God there.’’
– Ijeoma Umebinyou
For our mothers
how can you write about them?
women shot dead in the heads
beneath their husbands’ bodies
hung to replace the flag
the war that / ate our mothers in 1990,
came back / and finished us in 2003
how can you tell my sister these things?
about memories stuck in our throats like a fish’s bone
& how once the sounds of bullets
made our mothers’ bodies blush
–
Note: In Karn’s poems, Mary Magdalene represents women who were killed or went through tragic events during the Liberian civil war.
Jeremy T. Karn is a poet from somewhere in Liberia. He was born between 1995 and 1997 but not in 1996. He writes from his room he barely leaves. His poems have been published by African Writer Magazine, Praxis Magazine, Kalahari Review, Nanty Greens, The Rising Phoenix Review, Eboquill, and elsewhere.