Forget (Arua) Remember (Pakwac) - Gloria Kiconco

Forget how the rolling hills stopped rolling and began unfolding

into flatlands. You have left the badlands.

Forget how the sky opened and left behind skyscrapers and scraped knees

bleeding into pavement

and how blood

paved your way into estrangement.

Your scraped skin already belonged to the streets and the wounds

flowering on your body are the cultivation of your memory

ploughed into the fields of your furrowed eyebrows.

Forget questioning your placement at the back of the van and in the hands

that held you in lieu of seatbelts.

Hands that fed you apple juice

and chocolate melts until you felt

you might laugh or cry or vomit.

Forget airport departures and deportations.

Forget goodbyes to the dearly departed and the smell

of department stores.

Forget that your life has been capsized

and re-sized to compartments and capsules and containers

You swallow them, they swallow you.

You are the ability to fit one container into another.

You can save space.

You are not filling anything.

You are to be filled.

When you reach Arua,

Forget the cramped hotel rooms and hidden hostility and hope

that possibility is all you remember.

That and the sun.

Forget that too.

Eclipse days into nights and gaze into nights

until you starblaze your sight into forgetting what happened

Or didn’t happen in that bed.

Forget your destination

and all destinations which are just the other side of departures.

Forget goals and objectives, object to every spiritual directive

directing you to be reflective.

Forget where you come from, forget

where you are going. Forget

how to get from Kampala to Arua. Forget the path.

Remember Pakwac

Remember small and sweet mangoes eaten to pits

and pit stops that stopped pity

from growing on you.

Remember the sun tattooed temporary on your shoulder

even though your temperament already tampered with time

and its laws.

Forget your flaws and how they trickled

with the mango juice down to your elbow.

Remember rest stops and resting and that break

when you were breaking,

when you wished the brakes of the van would

give way to an accident that would rest

you in your final rest stop.

Remember resting even when you are

testing every edge

to see if it can conjure hope.

Forget leaving and forget reaching.

Forget preaching. In fact,

fuck preachers who cheat you into believing

self-loathing is another form of breathing and you

have lost heart beats, now,

it’s just your heart steady streaming.

Forget waking and sleeping, remember lucid dreaming.

Remember how to be in between being

and when you fell that you are at the end of your being,

end of your rope, end of your hope,

Forget Arua,

Remember Pakwac.

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Gloria Kiconco (born 1990) Uganda

Source: AfroWomenPoetry