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| Kikwit The army decree flutters on posts shrieking like stuck doves None in! None out! yet the groggy stevedores still assemble on the wharf, setting off curlicues of smoke from red-ember fists Ekimi sits to himself snaking hands over, through one, then the next Turk's Head Knot, Alpine Butterfly Bend Monkey's Fist Hitch the cryptomancy of sailors where all cataclysm and heavy weather can be solved by the correct sequence of knots Kikwit examines itself for bleeding women and men liquefied through the night are carted one, then the next into shanties with black X'd doors Once a songfrenzied port Kikwit now staggers agonized into the world preens, expectantly throwing eyes down the river waiting to die
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Passage To Kinshasa Is this boat going to Kinshasa? her voice is a broken storm The captain completes another: the Surgeon's Knot He pauses the length of two contaminated breaths before collapsing the rope through his fingertips He doesn't need to look up he already knows about her eyes insomniac black and furious her tunic a damp scarlet oriflamme For a few days he's seen her by the quay tirelessly sopping eyelids shut when their innards turned to paste giving out entirely everywhere in all-consuming charity Morning, water boils before the bow an asp on a goldsmith's anvil uncoiling away from this miasmal mirage over, through, again his hands incant the Surgeon's Knot falls apart as quick as everything here, a broken storm through his fingers and his whisper, it is it is now |