Brother Yao

Small Circles, Big Wide World   

For Jidda Jalloh and Brian Gilmore

The streets of Wuhan look like New York at night
If you ain’t never been there. You won’t believe me.
Maybe Paris or Amsterdam, but not Wuhan. Who
Ever heard Wuhan? China city bright lights, subway.

Once I saw the moon rise so bright, I thought about
The other side of the world. Who I was, what I was 
looking at, looking for. How far away home is.  
What I was looking at, more than who was looking at me.

I come from America so the staring ain’t never bother me.  
I been frisked, so eye frisking don’t matter. The ten thousand
Eyes, I don’t really care. Nobody thought I had a gun.
I learned to not mind the minding. Where I come from

It’s different. Our own American danger.  
I post up with Jidda, a Jalloh from the tribe of tribes
I done heard about, with jeans, and rage like mine.
We jin jiu and bai jui, talk shit, and eat chicken feet

On the street, eat with chopsticks, like Pan-Africanism 
Is more and less than Garvey, Nkrumah, and Padmore.
In this city we sing some name that the Chinese don’t know.
He from Freetown, and I’m from the land of the Free.

Half the folks I know will say this ain’t a poem. Africa
Ain’t a country it’s a continent. Cheap wine and cheap 
Cigarettes, lazy susans, and the paper boxes ornament 
Of the old empire, and the people coming in from the hills

To the skyscraper cities, to Starbucks, and Burger King,
Eat ma la tang everyday, suck some sweet, eat breakfast,
Lunch, and dinner, slurp the wine and say gambei, like 
We say bottoms up. China bottom’s up, the world spins

On its axis, flips everyday. An African and African American
Singing blues across the sea. Jidda laugh. I’m like, it’s just you
And me. Worlds a part in the world we don’t know. Charles
Taylor destroyed Freetown. He once stayed on my street

In Lanham, MD. A city nobody knows, like the Chinese cities,
Like Pizhou, like Wuhan. We get drunk and ask what’s a poem
Gotta do with anything? I told Jidda I lost my business and my head
Broke. Jidda said the dogs in Mo Yan, were like the dogs in Freetown.

They ate flesh. We all eat flesh he say. We look each other in the eyes 
And say my father. Rage, passion, love, red eyes, and the strange music
We sing to ourselves when we are drunk or so happy the world will not
Take us seriously. Those dogs, Jidda said, you had to kill them.

Brother Yao (Hoke S. Glover III) is a poet and non-fiction writer living in Lanham, MD. His work has been published in Crab Orchard Review, African-American Review, Ploughshares, Beltway Quarterly, and other journals. He teaches at Bowie State University in the Department of Language, Literature, and Cultural Studies. His second book of poetry, One Shoe Marching Towards Heaven, was published by Africa World Press in Summer 2020. He is currently working on a book of essays called The Wuhan Soundtrack based on his experience living in Wuhan, China and has completed a manuscript entitled, Crazy as Hell: The Best Little Book on Black History, with Dr. Valerie Prince, which is slated to be published in Fall of 2022.