Read the introduction, “The Horse Is Always Running” by Monica Sok.
In Need of Names
1990
The heat in Nigeria doesn’t care if it’s rainy season,
or that the mangos will rot,
of the sound of milk cans buckling in the pantry.
The lights have been gone four days.
The houseboy returns with gasoline,
bread, warm bottles of orange soda.
It is an hour outside evening.
My sister waves her passport like a fan.
Auntie Mairo and Auntie Asabe unwrap
their headscarves, their hair springing
like perennials. Inside each sigh they make a kingdom.
Tonight you can smell the whole country.
2004
When Auntie Fatima picks us up from the airport,
she drives right up the landing strip.
Kano smells of ripened avocados and men
with semi-automatics. Laughing, she tells our mother the price
of petrol has been rising for weeks,
soon the whole country will strike.
When we arrive at the compound, she waves to the armed
guards keeping out thieves and militia.
We eat fufu, Efo, and Egusi soup.
My sister, bowl after bowl of jollof rice.
Like a woman no longer living
outside the language of her happiness,
our mother smiles with her teeth—
her hands two bright shadows.
Auntie Mairo shakes her head and says their youngest brother
has disappeared picking bees
off his madness, how their eldest brother comes to money.
The generator sputters in the distance
and here, no second wives
cloud their conversation.
2014
Switching between Hausa and English, Auntie Fatima
Says, “Kawo mana da ‘ya’ya mata,”
through the phone line. Then, “A’aha!
How do you steal three hundred girls?”
We begin listing names— Hanatu, Rejoice, Jummai,
Blessing. “Asabe, like your auntie,” she says.
“Fourteen Hauwas like your mother’s name,” she says
as though I’ve forgotten mothers in Chibok are still weeping
on the floors of classrooms burned
into burial grounds. The same month
my Nigerian passport expires, the news calculates
their dowry at twelve American dollars,
reports some have died
of snakebites, malaria—
the rest of marriage. “Kawo mana da ‘ya’ya mata,”
Auntie Fatima says again,
but President Goodluck does not trade
on mercy. She says, “where your from
we name children Blessing, Comfort, Grace
for times, lost or stolen, there is none.”
Kinging
Disease mother buried
like a baby. Days slept away,
blinds drawn. Father’s tired prayers
behind their bedroom wall
while sister and I drew dream catchers that looked
like hanging mans. In the Ohio dark,
coyotes nuzzled the neck of a swan.
The sun and the sky and the blood.
Days later, mother,
jail-sprung. Morning
returning her fajr. Sister and I,
light in our Catholic school uniforms,
sneaking out to poke the swan’s
pregnant body, curious
the shape death would take and wanting
to prove small women could be
Kings. Behind us, mother shuffling
in the houselight, her body rearranging
its omens. Quiet in both directions,
save the blood.
It was the year
the almonds didn’t shell right
and waiting was its own tenderness.
All our ghosts have come
down from their mountain.
We have so many gods
and none of them
can be trusted.
Born in Zaria, Nigeria, Hafizah Geter’s poems appear in The New Yorker, Tin House, Narrative Magazine, and elsewhere. She serves on the board of VIDA: Women in the Literary Arts and is an editor for Little A from Amazon Publishing.