picking seashells

By Jeremy Teddy Karn

 —  april 21, 1999

the music hiding inside the wet wind

shivers me

 
i am goosebumped

nude to the waist            before the sea’s

indigo uncurling

in my small        saltwatered eyes

 
my mouth is ajar

summer rain

stutters my tongue  
       
and moistened

sand conceals my toes                 
 

i abide in hunger
 
fresh cabbage skin
               abides in my mouth    

 
beside the lagoon—     
        
other children loom        on back-bent

palm trees
 

the sea swells blue  
        
cousin dorcas wades in it— 
 

i tongue away

chewed cabbage debris

trapped between my teeth      
  

and the sea waves— 

a folded trouser leg       

climbs above my ankles       
  

every sea lifespan  

is how it gets fed  

with people        and wrecked fishing boats     
 

little priscillia sits in the sand 

sucks the juice from her left thumb      
 

wind whistles and wrestles our bodies    

rain ceases         waves roll        
 

and the war marches into liberia   

the second time— 
​
seven days before my birthday

---

name me someone who does not pray,

and i will go out and say a prayer for him

By Jeremy Teddy Karn

​Content warning: Graphic war imagery

​a barrage of mortar shells landed in and around the u.s. embassy, killing dozens of liberians who went there to seek refuge   

 —StarNews, July 23, 2003

on the eastern side of the united

states embassy— 

a boy runs toward a red cross trolley

full of bodies
 

two bloody hands

flooded remains of his sister— 
    
        
between the lurd’s bombardment    
     
a mother labors       
       
breastfeeding her dead child 
 

she begs— 
 
lifting the child
                full of bullets  
 

american soldiers watch     
         
behind a bulletproof window 
 

she wants the child to ascend

beyond the greystone gate’s bloodbath   
 

a nameless boy and i

wander after our mothers 
 

he follows me like muddy footprints—   

turning bodies over bodies 
 

every lifeless woman on the floor

is a gamble on our chests
 

the boy gazes at his blood-bandaged wound 

please do not die —   
       
i want to say to him 
 

i take him in my arms— 
       
squeeze his thinness 
 
try to make him

focus on the picture  

of his mother 

we have already shown to the red cross family tracing network — 
 

pictures are bribes  
        
mothers place in children’s hands

to stay alive  
 

i want my fear  

to reassure him  
                         
everything in monrovia was beautiful once — 
 

please do not die — i am saying 
 

but silence is floating in his mouth— 
​
is it not the last thing he is supposed to feel?

---

hideout [2003]

By Jeremy Teddy Karn

here—    where only death

knows the distance

between it and i 

is my momentary paradise 
 

tucked legs

against my rust-boned

chest     is how i pray     

to nothingness   
 

two months

with the johnsons— 
              
two months  
     
without a mother           
    

the war separates flesh

from eden’s dust              
 

alas   alas —         my friends   
               
my head carries ashes for them 
 

i watch a child 

watch her father  
 

watch  

a pigeon beak

red soil   a woman lies in— 

lifeless?
 

clouds rainbow monrovia 

a covenant remembered    
 

never again will water destroy this earth

but guns 
​
pointed at each other

---

Jeremy Teddy Karn was born in Monrovia, Liberia. He received his MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He writes and teaches creative writing for a living. More of his writing and publications can be found on his website: www.jeremyteddykarn.com