A Montage of my Abscission.
My cameo was on a gardening show.
A self-seeding Sea Holly half-way into my autumn
changing into the other category in an exposé
on ethnicity data. Reborn a Pidgin-speaker - in a hair-extension shop
in the London News, I replied in English to How you day?
Saturated with the Six O’clock News I told my son violence is on the rise
where father hollered expletives when I killed a baby cockroach.
& I watched myself holding impromptu funerals in Homes-by-the-Sea.
I was a buyer cackling at midges because my screen doors doubled-up
as a gravesite. I became a disused replica of the old-me - a property
semi-detached from a protective layer a dad cocooned a child in.
In a state of flux in a cooking show I was a three-legged trivet:
a dish-not-local-to-Britain a dominating African herb
& a contestant’s gravy boat capsized into a primetime debate
about too many migrants. On my son’s computer screen,
I morphed into a buccaneer pirate avatar manning an ocean
& shouting exterminate all those seafaring invaders.
Or they’ll sneak into our enclave & dominate it.
Bridgette James
Bridgette James is a British Sierra Leonean writer. She was shortlisted for the Bridport Poetry prize and Renard Press Poetry Prize in 2024 and won the Flash Fiction Summer Poetry Prize 2024.