that they had recited the entire rosary. Then I tugged at the ropes and
the lunch bells chimed. The old people sat eight to a table, and with
their mouths filled with ugali, sour lentils and okra soup, said things
like, “Do not buy chapati from Kadima’s Kiosk—Kadima’s wife sits
on the dough and charms it with her buttocks,” or, “Did I tell you
about Wambua, the one whose cow chewed a child because the child
would not stop wailing?”In the afternoon, I emptied the bedpans and
soaked the old people’s feet in warm water and baking soda, and
when they trooped off to mass I took my purse and went home.The
Christmas before the cane tractor killed my father, he drank his tea
from plates and fried his eggs on the lids of coffee jars, and he
retrieved his Yamaha drum-set from a shadowy, lizardy place in the
back of the house and sat on the veranda and smoked and beat the
drums until his knuckles bled. One day he took his stool and handheld radio and went to the veranda, and I sat at his feet, undid his
laces and peeled off his gummy socks. He wiggled his toes about.
They smelt slightly fetid, like sour cream.
African Poetry Book Fund Names Mahtem Shiferraw Winner of
2015 Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets
The African Poetry Book Fund and Prairie Schooner are pleased to
announce that Ethiopian-American poet Mahtem Shiferraw’s has been
named the winner of the 2015 Sillerman First Book Prize for African
Poets for her manuscript, Fuchsia. Shiferraw will receive a $1000
cash award and publication of her manuscript as part of the African
Poetry Book Series by the University of Nebraska Press and Amalion
Press in Senegal, to be released in the spring of 2016. The Sillerman
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