Come children, climb in them seat. They leather line and warm, but miss out one-two, stay arms length apart before we go start. We go slide past them aisle stack up with tin fish, dry peas and rotten fruit. Let we fly through them wide- open freezer doors, and hold on firm, just for this! Gardez! How we hook and hang up wild meat, swing carcass in we own slipstream breeze. While everything around moving to millennia musak, watch how we dodge and shoot past all that melt and stink. We go slide past monoculture – easy now – we moving on well beyond, breezing through all them colony, one after the other, while they fall bap! bap! and collapse down like domino, into their own kinda disorder. Don’t forget to breathe. In. Out. And light plenty torch on the way. We plan good eh? Here, pick up some of this wood: it nice and dry and easy to burn. Now clap and sing out with raise-hand praise:
[full brass band with
drums, crescendo]
When you breed a dog to kill, it could only kill!
When them gear get perpetual oil, they go never stand still!
[decrescendo, with
pandeiro roll]
So keep going little ones. Speed up quick quick. Put on your mask, make sure to breathe from them tank. Filter your water well. You could see? You could count? Bounce babies, bounce. Fly even higher! Watch what we doing and make sure to follow. Mark up we game, because we write them odds. After all, hell done flip over, so who laughing now?
Fawzia Muradali Kane is an architect and poet.
Born in Trinidad & Tobago, she came to the UK on a scholarship to study architecture, and is now a director of KMK Architects in London.
Her poetry has been extensively published in anthologies and journals. Her poem Kaieteur Falls was shortlisted for the 2017 Montreal International Poetry Prize.
Her debut poetry collection Tantie Diablesse (2011) was longlisted in the 2012 Bocas Lit Fest prize. Thamesis Publications produced her long sequence Houses of the Dead (2014) as an illustrated pamphlet. She is now preparing her second collection.