Three Poems by Claudine Toutoungi

PN Review 243, September - October 2018

Chiaroscuro

Feeling of late even more
deracinated than usual

and finding a quartz, tinkly rosary in her father’s old cigar box

she began to talk
privately in public places

parks, station platforms, open spaces, conscious with every stone of how

she let herself be picked
up and put down often

and wishing for firmer categories

aware of being
neither the little angel

clinging to the off-white ankle of Christ

nor the shadowy Magdalene
slipping away

and not unhappy about this

(though some days to be
either blind or definitely a seer would be simpler)

she kept on

fumbling
towards salvation

as if you could muster it

as if you could force a miracle
out of the rushing air.

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Apology, for Ayano

I am sorry I did not come through on the English conversation
after our first and only lesson. Winter here is hard. The cold –
interminable and I could not take the long walk across town into
sleet to reach your house. I admit I did not uphold my end of the
bargain. I should have nailed my colours to the mast where
you and where your baby Shunto could have seen them.
Ayano, I assure you – not all the people of this land are shilly
-shalliers, fobber-offers, shifty loons, curmudgeons, dolts,
prevaricators, poltroons, lugworms, shoddy planners, hags,
hogs, sots and shameful dilly-dalliers. Not all of us. Though
in the wintertime, I grant you, it may feel like more than some.


Rift

Pretend it’s August. Pretend there’s sunlight on bare arms, dappled
water, louche, marauding ducks.

Pretend the sheep wear serious faces, slouch in groins of gouged-out
rock and far-off human chatter’s growing slack,

losing all heft until there’s nothing on the breeze but buzzards
mewling. Nothing more incomprehensible than that,

nothing more consoling.

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These poems by Claudine Toutoungi are taken from PN Review 243, September - October 2018. Further contributions from Toutoungi are available in the archive to paying subscribers, as well as more poetry, features, reviews and reports from across the back catalogue.