Our Night Hangs By A Thread

By AKWE AMOSU

April’s cool Catskill forests are yet to leaf out
but the maple’s crimson flowers blush whole hillsides
deepening the dense green in the fields below.

No more bullshit, says a Trump 2020 banner we pass 
on our way to the Seager trailhead. At a farm, two flags,
the other for the thin blue line. Every day a new killing.

Climbing Pakatakan through a maze of slender trunks, we are
breathless at the beauty, a quilt of moss, lichen and snowdrops, 
yellow downy violets and bloodroot among the boulders.

Clyde is off the leash on the old railway line.
From across a meadow an enraged voice screams
in the gentle sunlight. We leash the dog.

The riverbank’s pebbles are blue, grey, mauve and brown,
the water limpid, fast, icy. We step from stone to stone,
watching each other across before continuing.

I hesitate before entering any store in the little town
but keep it to myself for fear my companion will try 
to reason it away, as if it has anything to do with reason.

Daunte Wright was pulled over for having air freshener
hanging from his rear-view mirror.  He was wanted for weed.
They shot him by mistake. It wasn’t a mistake. There is no reason.

Even the sign saying hate has no home here suggests
it has found one with the neighbors. I won’t risk 
backing into any driveway to turn the car around

My son’s union shirt and cap, my brown body—we are loud
against the murmur of these mountains. Yet we are so quiet.
At night I dream of punishment, that they will cut the thread.

 

Akwe Amosu is a Nigerian/British poet. Her poems have appeared in South African journals Carapace, New Contrast, and Stanzas, and U.S. journals Illuminations and The Common. Her book, Not Goodbye, was published by Snail Press in 2010. She works in New York on a project to support human rights leadership.

[Purchase Issue 24 here.] 

Our Night Hangs By A Thread

Related Posts

cover of HEIRLOOM

March 2025 Poetry Feature: Catherine-Esther Cowie’s Heirloom

CATHERINE-ESTHER COWIE
Her eye-less eye. My long / longings brighten, like tinsel, the three-fingered / hand. Ashen lip. To exist in fragments. / To exist at all. A comfort. / A gutting. String her up then, / figurine on the cot mobile. / And I am the restless infant transfixed.

Dispatches from Mullai Nilam, Marutha Nilam, and Neithal Nilam

VIJAYALAKSHMI
There is fire everywhere, / both inside and outside. / Unaware of the intensity of the fire, / they maintain silence / like the serenity of a corpse. / From the burning fire / bursts out a waterfall tainted in red. / All over the shores have bloomed / the flaming lilies of motherhood.

Gray Davidson Carroll's headshot next to the cover of The Common Issue 28.

Podcast: Gray Davidson Carroll on “Silent Spring”

GRAY DAVIDSON CARROLL
Poet Gray Davidson Carroll speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about their poem “Silent Spring,” which appears in The Common’s fall issue. Gray talks about poetry as a way to witness and observe the world and how we experience it, and how it’s changing.