Contents

MALIKA BOOKER

Red Ants Bite

Pepper Sauce

Saltfish

Exodus

The Overseer’s Lament

Warning

Cement

Erasure

Waiting for Father

Sweet Liquor

After Liming in the Local Rum Shop on Diamond Street,

Vigil

Burial Ground

Faith

Libation

Brixton Market

The House on Jubilee Street

Our Last Supper

How Our Bodies Did This Unfamiliar Thing

Lot’s Wife Speaks

My Humble Beseech

SHARON OLDS

The Sisters of Sexual Treasure

The Language of the Brag

The Pope’s Penis

New Mother

On the Subway

The Feelings

My Father Speaks to Me from the Dead

I Go Back to May 1937

Calvinist Parents

The Bra

His Costume

19

The Riser

Bathing the New Born

The Clasp

Bible Study: 71 B.C.E.

Physics

Psalm

from War

Material Ode

The Worst Thing

Maritime

One Secret Thing

Self-Portrait, Rear View

Red Sea

Poem of Thanks

Ode to the Hymen

WARSAN SHIRE

Our Blue Bodies

The House

Backwards

Her Blue Body Full of Light

Midnight in the Foreign Food Aisle

Souvenir

Nail Technician as Palm Reader

Grief Has Its Blue Hands in Her Hair

The Ugly Daughter

Conversations About Home (at the Deportation Centre)

Maymuun’s Mouth

Birds

Fire

Your Grandfather’s Hands Were Brown

Beauty

Mermaids

When We Last Saw Your Father

In Love and in War

Your Mother’s First Kiss

Sara

Trying to Swim with God

Acknowledgements

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