A Cento Poem
I say wow too, wow wow wow.
I get tired of grinding my brains so I just give up.
Budapest is not a kaka toilet for anybody to just walk in.
I’m blazing out of this kaka country myself.
I will get many houses: one in Budapest, one in Los Angeles,
one in Paris. Whatever I feel like, Bastard says.
1. Wash your hands clean
I don’t know what the white people were trying to do
stealing not just a tiny piece but a whole country.
Who can ever forget you stole something like that?
I don’t go to school anymore because all the teachers left
to teach in South Africa and Botswana and Namibia and them.
a. Practice a strengths-based approach to care
Hey, cabbage ears, what are you bathing for?
We’re going to play Andy-over, what are you bathing for?
I have to go to church. Don’t you know Jesus died today?
My father says your church is just kaka.
2. Stop the bleeding.
I was coming in from playing Find Bin Laden
And my grandmother was not there
And my grandfather was there
And he got on me and pinned me down
And he clamped a hand over my mouth
And was heavy like a mountain.
b. Ask for permission to discuss potentially difficult subjects.
I can see that she wants me to say something,
Something maybe important, so I say,
Do you want to go and steal guavas?
3. Clean the wound.
Nobody wants to be rags of countries like
Congo, like Somalia, like Iraq, like Sudan,
Like Haiti, like Sri Lanka, and not even this one we live in –
Who wants to be a terrible place of hunger and falling apart?
c. Recognize that trauma may not end after migration.
If I’m lucky, like today, I get to be the USA
Which is a country-country;
who doesn’t know that the USA is the
big baboon of the world? I feel like it’s my
country now because my aunt Fostalina
lives there in Destroyedmichygen.
4. Protect the wound.
But you are not the one suffering.
You think watching BBC means you know
what is going on? No, you don’t, my friend,
It’s the wound that knows the texture of the pain;
It’s us who stayed here feeling the real suffering,
so it’s us who has the right to even say anything
about that or anything and anybody.
d. Create an immigrant-friendly heath care environment.
It’s your country, Darling? Really, it’s your country,
are you sure? Just tell me one thing.
What are you doing not in your country right now?
Why did you run off to America, Darling Nonkululako
Nkala, huh? Why did you just leave? If it’s your
country, you have to love it to live in it and not leave it.
You have to fight for it no matter what, to make it right.
5. Change the dressing.
Tell me, do you abandon your house because it’s burning
or do you find water to put out the fire?
And if you leave it burning, do you expect the flames
to turn into water and put themselves out?
You left it, Darling, my dear, you left the house burning
and you have the guts to tell me in that stupid accent
that you were not even born with, that doesn’t
even suit you, that this is your country?
Source and Method: language from three found sources: 1) Children’s dialogue interior thoughts in NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names for the central stanzas, 2) Guidelines for wound care at Cornerstone Urgent Care Center for the right-justified lines, and 3) “Applying Trauma-Informed Practices to the Care of Refugee and Immigrant Youth: 10 Clinical Pearls” (Children, Miller, K. M., Brown, C. R. et al., 2019) for the left-justified lines.
As first published in Unlost, Issue 29