LETTER TO AMERIKA

Beloved Amerika
I dreamt sadamu and Kaddafi chased after America
Through oil-sodden sand dunes.
Ghosts of dethroned spirits crossing the Blue Nile across Sahara valleys,
fingers and bare feet burning, crackling in the pans of their Sahara oil.
Ghosts whose blood juice the freedom of their people, people of their song.
Ghosts whose ritual is NATO and obituary is gun thunder
Dear Amerika
I dreamt of Afrika shitting typhoid after
eating autocracy: chocolate-coated democracy.
Anthropology and ancientry roasted and recycled in the ovens of Harvard and California.
Professors and politicians juggled like lottery balls.
My riddled fingers itch to write a long letter to AmeriKa
About war cooked in labs and ideologies hatched in test tubes 
for peanut states to eat and sing–
mental genocide. Beloved Amerika. 
Ebola ghosts eating tubes, arvs and GMOs.
Mental genocide of Kongo and other cassava republics.
Cable and fox networks roasting struggles in the stomachs of young revolutions.
My nostrils are tired of the stench, 
stench of human flesh fried in the charcoal of superpower egos
Dear America, my eyes are red 
itching with political pepper in Panama and Haiti, my heart 
sings for their freedom.

Artwork by Myriam Louise Taleb