Postcard from Konanga – Published in Molotov Cocktail, July 2014

A Postcard from Konanga | Published in Molotov Cocktail, July 2014.

by Dan Campbell

Having a wonderful time; wish you were here. We took a tour yesterday and saw cyclops children peering through windows of doorless houses. The natives worship the moon, it controls the flow of their urges and their blood; women carry baskets of fog all morning; there are twenty-one verbs for different ways to spit and one must bow before three-legged dogs to show respect. 

Packs of wolves make the forests dark with their black sweat; shadows are lined up against a wall at noon and shot; faces are painted blue to ward off a moth’s evil eyes and on odd-numbered days handfuls of hummingbirds are released with dreams strapped to their beaks. But no one here slits the throats of rivers and a homeless day can beg for alms without a license; tomorrow we leave on a cruise to pull up salt by its roots and then we’ll backpack to the place where storks are shaped like letters of the alphabet.

#

Dan Campbell is a banjo player from North Carolina who is currently working in the swampland of Washington DC. His poetry has been published in more than two dozen magazines and he has earned $48.63 in royalties so far.