Vivid,
vibrantly vicious,
it was black
Friday
for days, black
Friday for months
but the blue gelatinous glue of desire
had covered my pores for years.
In it I drowned.
I fought for breath
under the insolent vigilant glare of billboards
that sold insecurities and fabulous remedies
fixes for everything
that fixed me up high so good
so prettily
but I kept crashing down.
I gorged myself on candy,
all sorts of candy, from all sorts of places.
The candy was viscous,
lividly vicious
fossil fuel
black.
–
Yarri Kamara is a Sierra Leonean-Ugandan writer, translator and policy researcher currently based in Milan, Italy. Her poetry has appeared in The Weganda Review, Brittle Paper, Poda Poda Stories and The Kalahari Review. In 2023 she was a finalist for the Sevhage Literary Prize for Poetry (Nigeria) and for the National Translation Award in Prose (USA). She recently co-edited the anthology “Sahara: A Thousand Paths into the Future” published by Sternberg Press.
