To Kayak
wade into the ebbed tides
poised on a kayak’s open womb
clutch the paddle
torso rotation to the right, to the left
sweep strokes
do not scrape the glimmery snakeskins of pebbles
or answer to caws not bird sounds
but foremothers eddying the riparian area
branches drip from trees
seaweed stipes, a tributary of your mother tongue
slither towards a mainstem
slippery logs mimic frowns of grandmothers
jagged points of wood are pursed lips
your paddle unearths a splash
droplets twinkle, snarl.
The haunted
in my myopia, trees lose
their sharp outlines;
hard barks soften,
poorly erased edges
of a stroke. People flicker,
unsteady light bulbs, faces
obscured, their eyes holes forever
hanging open and ready
to gulp and gulp.
Sybil
Without my glasses, I see
the end first
before I draw
close enough to see
the present.
The Arrival
A girl died above sea level flying
an altitude of 38,000 feet walled
by strangers
who do not know her Igbo no hand to douse the pain
of dying no loved one to say nwa m anwuna
air hosts panicked travelers peek at her dying
ask for identification her dying body already prepped
for the news for an exoneration report:
we are saddened by this unfortunate incident. Our airline is committed to…
the girl who left
home to study to amass a skill
a girl amassed her kill died dreaming in the middle of nowhere or somewhere
above a wetland a girl reaches the
port of entry as a body does not reach the carrousel
a girl’s end tolled
a girl died a girl.
Frances Ogamba is a 2025 Mercatus Center’s Don Lavoie Fellow at George Mason University, a 2024 Jacobson Scholar at the Hawkinson Foundation for Peace and Justice, and a 2024 Miles Morland Writing Scholar. She received the 2024 Walter H. Judd Travel fellowship, the 2024 COGS Research grant, and the 2022 College of Liberal Arts fellowship from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. Her awards include the 2022 Diana Woods Award in Creative Nonfiction, the 2020 Kalahari Short Story Competition, and the 2019 Koffi Addo Prize for Creative Nonfiction. She is a runner up for the 2024 Minnesota BIPOC Emerging Writer Award, and a finalist for the 2023 Locus Awards, 2019 Writivism Short Story Prize and 2019 Brittle Paper Awards for short fiction.
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