Love's Remit / WhatsApp Message at 9:37 p.m. Interrupts Bach, and: Prayer Rug

Abstract

Love's Remit / WhatsApp Message at 9:37 p.m. Interrupts Bach, and: Prayer Rug Tsitsi Ella Jaji (bio) Love's Remit / WhatsApp Message at 9:37 p.m. Interrupts Bach harpsichord rejigsfingers. still nave's true north:Soli Deo Gloria _____ face south to pray. coltan'sglare sheds light—a burstappendix on hold. fees first. mothers clasphands, thrust green into the ether:what redeem first meant. swipe left for WesternUnion. saved name and numbermoves money. swift enough? flash screen at doctor—mother goading Hippocrates'soath. this world comes third. her mother, sister to myfather, mothered me asfemale fathers must, then left a house oforphans. my daughter's fifthand my first, born in 2018. her first will not dieon our watch. she must not die.keep watch over us. [End Page 21] Prayer Rug when i say i willpray for you, i mean this:i'll go for a walk in my lone language.tongues of fire will give sorrowthe slip. or lie. gaps of reason i'm on my knees, heartin sack. dull or just dead tired,sculling on my phone. or i'm moving stones,planter pots, and rods of muskon indigo cloth. i am feeling withall i have got—huddlinghuman into you. this is ubuntu,i suppose. ubuntu thoughtsand prayers. [End Page 22] Tsitsi Ella Jaji tsitsi ella jaji's poetry collections include Mother Tongues (Cave Canem/Northwestern Press Prize 2018); Beating the Graves; and Carnaval (a chapbook in the New Generation African Poets series). She teaches English and African/African American Studies at Duke University, and is the author of Africa in Stereo: Music, Modernism and Pan-African Solidarity. Copyright © 2023 Tsitsi Ella Jaji