Map
i.e., land turned napkin
i.e., the pen taking stock of what kings care to own
i.e., the Nile, the most dangerous and generous body of nature in the entire
continent, becomes the blue line asking permission from black lines
to keep flowing
i.e., even water is disaster here
i.e., how easily the man-made smudge off
i.e., when I asked my sister what shaped the right-side of Ethiopia like a
beak, she answered, “the crisis of Europeans”
i.e., the drawing of a line tends to be—if not the final—the origin of
catastrophes
i.e., it’s possible for a nation to lose its ears in a few months
i.e., red on paper, red on the fields
by Abigail Mengesha
from Frontier Poetry