My poem "Checkpoint" in Persimmon Tree, The Summer Issue/International Poets

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My poem "Checkpoint" in Persimmon Tree, The Summer Issue/International Poets

Pit Pinegar, the poetry guest editor, of Persimmon Tree, The Summer Issue/International Poets, is the author of three books of poetry, most recently The Physics of Transmigration. She taught creative writing to gifted high school students at a Hartford, CT magnet arts school and at the Center for Creative Youth at Wesleyan University for nearly two decades. A multi-genre writer, she is currently at work on memoirs and a fourth collection of poetry.

In her introduction, Pit Pinegar states that as guest editor for this issue of Persimmon Tree’s International Poetry, I sat down to the task as I might at a three-star Michelin restaurant, sending word to the chef: Send out whatever you like. Surprise me! Reading this year’s submissions was a rich, varied, sometimes startling experience. Individual poems were, at their cores, finely crafted. They were emotional, historical, social, political—more than occasionally, all four. The winning poems crossed cultures (Poe in Athens; a grieving sister in Halifax dreaming of the solace of whole-family grieving in Morocco). They piqued my curiosity (you bet, I now know who Otto Dix was, and his painting, Old Lovers, will haunt me for a long time). These poems coursed through me: I could smell fear and smoke and sweat; I flinched at gunfire; loneliness and vulnerability, resolve and hard-won triumph resonated to the marrow of my bones.

I am honored to share this section of the Persimmon Tree Summer Issue with fellow poets living in Norway, Paris, Greece, Canada, England, Spain, Kyiv, Ukraine, Serbia, Israel, and Australia.

All poems can be read and outstanding illustrations seen at this link:

https://persimmontree.org/summer-2023/international-poetry/

 

Checkpoint

(Liberian Civil War)

 

The line is tortoise slow.

Dust, smelling of pungent death,

is churned up by people in cars,

and on foot, fleeing,

after passing inspection,

after surviving interrogation.

 

Death lines the roadsides.

The rankness of piss

and fetid decay of tossed bodies,

mostly men, charge your nose.

 

You wait your turn,

hear and feel fear rattling in your chest,

running through your body

like a rushing river.

 

Fate waits­ in black and white

—a split-second decision

made by a soldier-boy

 high on weed and power.

His verdict could be based

on a bad experience—an adult who once

whipped his back raw red.

Or, he might not like your face.

 

Or, you might be spared,

if you remind him of the father

he lost to the war,

the memory, painting his life gray,

clouding his once bright moon.

 

The green grass you ate this morning,

because there was no food,

is finding its way back down your gut.

You can hear your belly squelching,

settling back down

into the trenches of your bowel.

 

You speed away, dash away,

escaping the bang, bang, bang

of what could have been

your last view of the yellow sun,

brown dust rising against the light blue sky.

© Althea Romeo Mark 

Born in Antigua, West Indies, Althea Romeo Mark is an educator and internationally published writer who grew up in St. Thomas, US, Virgin Islands. She has lived and taught in the USA, Liberia (West Africa), the United Kingdom, and Switzerland since 1991. A dual American and Swiss citizen, she writes short stories and personal essays in addition to poetry.

Althea Romeo Mark’s upcoming publication,  On the Borders of Belonging, summer 2023, a chapbook, is expected to be published in the summer 2023. 

She is the author of two full-length poetry collections, The Nakedness of New(2018) and If Only the Dust Would Settle, (English-German) 2009, and three chapbooks, Beyond Dreams: The Ritual Dancer (1989), Two Faces, Two Phases (1984) and Palaver(1978). Shu-Shu Moko Jumbi. The Silent Dancing Spirit (1974) is an anthology that includes poems by Althea Romeo-Mark and prose and poetry from participants in a Black Writers’ workshop conducted at the Department of African American Affairs at Kent State University.

 

Click on this link to read the entire journal (fiction, non-fiction, poetry, art, etc. https://persimmontree.org/