From atop the hills of smoldering
rubber, rancid chicken, shattered plastic, that rise
above the cloudy rivers of shit and piss and bathing
water, where the young men wrap their faces in t-shirts
and shovel out the blockages, demanding I pay
them before I cross their ply-board bridge,
where the grandmothers give birth to garden plots,
fenced off amidst the trash, bright green in all the black
where the naked toddler watches me walk past,
where the young father gathers glass and water
bottles, piled in bags around his shack, to be sold for
two dollars, made into sandals in Conakry, where the
God of Abraham and Isaac re-abandons his children
daily, where Moses climbs and hears no voice inside
the burning trash
in the bomeh where they survive by miracle and die
without metaphor or privacy, where the corpse of a
green and bloated piglet is stepped over without a
glance, where the young brides of Ascension Town
awake each morning to fry chicken feet in popping oil
before passing their charcoal-lit nights as raray girls,
selling their perfect disfigured bodies, crudely cut by
old women with glass or paring knife, in sweat and
sweet body odor, in the taste of burning trash that
sticks to your teeth, in the blood of mess or discarded
grains of rice, in Kingtom and Ascension Town
where the solitary child spreads her arms
on the highest slope, while I watch and hope, foolishly,
for a moment, that God, or anyone else, will embrace her.
Joshua Lew McDermott is from Idaho. His debut poetry book, Codex, was published by Hand to Mouth Books in 2019. He currently lives in Sierra Leone. When he isn’t traveling, he lives in Pittsburgh.