Each Wednesday, Editor's Choice brings you a poem from a new book selected as a must-read. Our feature editor this week is Amaud Jamaul Johnson.
Ladan Osman
My mother walked Liido Beach every morning when pregnant.
I know the mineral scent of saltwater wherever I am.
If the sun bakes the metal of earth, if my own damp scalp sweats,
if I hold my hennaed palms to my face.
I have said, "God. There is no god but God" into my metallic palms.
When my blood started, war started.
Ever since the war started, I dye a henna disk on each palm.
I refresh it when it browns, old blood. "God,"
into my mineral palms when the whole street was white sheets,
thin men digging graves night til dawn til night til dawn.
They paused for every single prayer.
An orb of light dragged me through a dim street, lifted me off my feet.
1 shouted, "This is my light!" and held it tight against my belly.
1 was still, beyond known stillness,
a gravity of my own, and still I didn't light the street.
The last thing my mother promised me was a photo of her,
five months pregnant, at the shore, backlit by the ocean.
"Go at dawn," she'd say. The water was warmest at dawn.
Girls went to the beach in whatever they were wearing,
even if they had school later. Their mothers couldn't keep them
from the water, from walking fully dressed into it.
There was nowhere to go but Liido.
The orb, a giant marble in my diaphragm, would float with me there.
There was nowhere to go but into the ocean.
Between this interior desert and the edge
of my known world, orange pekoe-tinted sand
marked with the heels and balls of firm and dazed feet.
Charred acacias facedown in the dust.
Succulents marking clusters of graves. Graves of people
and fruit-bearing trees. Bones of tall livestock,
the startling domes of camel ribs lit like a great hall
by the relentless sun. There is nowhere to go but the ocean.
Between here and its mineral scent, bones of people,
small and not small, bush lions and their young,
always litters of bones at the line between known
and wild worlds. Between here and Liido, the land
in full prostration. The only song, metallic. Shells,
or whole bullets underfoot, sometimes whole piles
at the edges and centers of towns put facedown
at night, at dawn, during afternoon prayer, at dusk.
Between here and Liido, the land and everything in it
in full submission to the mineral scent of our water
and blood and inability to cry anything,
not even "God! No god but God!" We go at dawn.
from the book EXILES OF EDEN /Coffee House Press
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Composite image of head shots of L. E. Sissman and Lynn Martin
A Second Look at Second Collections

In her regular column, "Second Acts," Lisa Russ Spaar explores the work of L. E. Sissman and Lynn Martin. "I was struck, as I was with Sissman’s first and second books, by the ways in which a serious diagnosis seems to have shaped [Martin's] later poems, strengthening and deepening them."

viaLOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS
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Cover of Aracelis Girmay's book, "Teeth"
What Sparks Poetry:
Cynthia Dewi Oka
on Aracelis Girmay’s “Arroz Poetica”

"I first encountered this poem in my early twenties, when I had just started to consciously write poems. It was a very difficult time in my life—I was a young mother juggling several precarious jobs and still grieving the loss of my father and separation from my community as a result of my decision to raise my child on my own. I was living like a ghost."
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