children of small places

a secret truth pulsates
inside the drummer’s palm
between the first ululation
& the last dying sound
from before her music became spectacle
before scaredness became ritual
& pilgrimage became god
if you forget
her tainted eyes
close yours & obey the 
veins of memory
where ancestry might say
gather here/ o daughters of small places

plant your memories into the walls
of your tongues
where they have no chance of survival
& every chance––
but only if you are
perfectly quiet.

This is how you forget yourself, daughter.
say your mother bled you/
next to the smoke that thunders
say the raging water gave her comfort
while you wrestled your way out
say the smoothened rubble along the Zambezi became home/
& you called the thundering Mosi-oa-Tunya
before a man stumbled upon it/ shouting
Discovery/
say he misnamed it 
Victoria
which leapt from his lips/
yet rumbled through you
say you took the water
placated your voice with it
& nodded

slowly now /
swallow flames inside your throat/
accept the boundary lines 
he made of your skin/
accuse your mothers 
teachings of sorcery/
bury your queens & mount
their graves with
pilgrim monuments 

then, when time has done her best/
each tick scraping across the sand
 like a stick eraser
stand in the ruin
of what was once vast/
wonder when you became
 a daughter 
of small places
when the cameras come
to capture the truthteller’s/
the contortion of your mouth
will become smile/
the new intonations in your voice/
song
& inside the madness
all that is left to do is
to catch the cadence 
of the drum/
flail
dance

ANKYLOGLOSSIA

in this life cycle/ your Mother 
Tongue is an untamed garden/

your lips/ its lax wardens/ 
your mouth/ a country

 brimming with your once enslaved 
clansmen/

weeds of other dialects 
sprout convoluted/

formerly living organs/
vowelsconsonantssyllables/

wiped out in a wrestling ring
 camouflaged as a school/

tender footed voices 
haemorrhaging nursery rhymes

ABCDEFuGee
urged by the blunt backs 

of dusters 
against chubby fingertips/

stripped mulberry sticks
 whipping palms/

in this life cycle/that dazed 
gash/ your face/ 

carries the recollections of all itselves/
the next time you race
 
out of your father/
when the yolk of your next 

mother accepts you/
feel for the missing 

tether at the floor
 of your mouth/

do not conflate
the razor’s scar for emancipation.

OUR FATHER

: our father, eavesdropping
on the mattress. is there a telephone 
cord between Mayo’s clasped fingers?
does it lift the tendrils of her strangled whispers
all the way up to your alabaster castle?
is Gaḇrīʾēlle an irate switchboard operator
with a rouged mouth & glasses zooming in on bloodshot eyes?
the glitch in Jesus’ refilling our mealie meal container


i carry an empty metal bowl, knock on our neighbour’s 
kitchen door where Please sits with may we borrow & my wrinkled 
shame as i curtsey a Thank you
maybe God is still busy.
maybe Mayo is still on hold.
maybe us singing, Jehovah Jireh, mwimbileni! is the on-hold music
maybe her payphone tokens ran out before we said In Jesus’ mighty name, Amen.

About the Author:

Mubanga is a Zambian attorney, editor, and writer. She is the author of The Mourning Bird (Jacana), unmarked graves (Tusculum University Press), Obligations to the Wounded (University of Pittsburgh Press), and Another Mother Does Not Come When Yours Dies (Wayfarer Books). She won the Drue Heinz Literature Prize (2024), selected by Angie Cruz; the Tusculum Review Poetry Chapbook Contest (2022), selected by Carmen Giménez; the Dinaane Debut Fiction Award (2019) & Kalemba Short Story Prize (2019). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Overland, Kweli, adda, Waxwing, Contemporary Verse 2, on Netflix and elsewhere. Her creative practice has received support from the Young African Leadership Initiative, the Hubert H. Humphrey (Fulbright) Fellowship, the Hawkinson Scholarship for Peace and Justice, the Africa Institute, and the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. She is the founding editor of Ubwali Literary Magazine, a current Miles Morland Scholar, and a PhD student and Interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Global Change (ICGC) scholar at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities.

*Feature image by Velizar Ivanov on Unsplash