the god of bad news and soft drinks
When the world was young and there were many gods —
big gods and small gods, the god of paper cuts,
the god of hailstones — they would come to visit us
as nosebleeds in hospital waiting rooms, nudging their chins
on the windowsill, the vending machine a kind of shrine.
I made offerings to the god of coca-cola:
a dice-throw of dead flies, crossed cutlery on paper plates.
These were the games we played. Last one standing
is a baobab. Neither of us would get to see each other grow
old.
Outside, a dog-cone of streetlight sputtered in the dark;
I answered a telephone box, naked as if struck by lightning;
and under the brass fist of clouds, the static of a dial tone,
a voice tried to steal itself back: look, Fahad, your mum passed away.
(Ignitionpress)
Woven through Fahad Al-Amoudi’s When the Flies Come are imagined letters home, rendered in the voice of a young Ethiopian prince, Alemayehu, forcibly removed from his country in 1868 and detained in Britain until his death, aged 18. With extraordinary precision and delicacy, Al-Amoudi’s poems dissect colonial evil as they also magnify joy, ‘the world open[ing] / like a pistachio’. As it threads letter forms amongst poems for grief, for family, for Marvin Gaye, for bugs, When the Flies Come asks who gets to write letters home, and what those words home might look like.
