Nothing would content the crows ahead of me in the winter storms, save that I should appoint a day for myself to be rebuilt like a snow elephant. I set a date ahead, prepared a room. I opened the front door of the abandoned chateau in the late morning, and borrowed a skin with some shades from a fairer in Spain. I wished to see whether my appearance would accord with the description: the noble torso, the sloping head, the long and graceful neck, big eyes in a dark husk, and black ringlets. This gargoyle.

                            Face it! This likeness of a truly imperial dignity was true. However, I remained fixed like a statue in its niche. I already seemed to have obtained a proof, all this time been sitting motionlessly on a tall stool, a Sotheby’s selection after the new price was fixed in the air

and to remain everything spoilt from the heart’s content.

I sat in its shades, aerating the soil below the snow field,

I sat near the berth, where the crows were still hanging,

in a position of almost preternatural erectness.


Jacob Kobina Ayiah Mensah is the author of the new hybrid works The Sun of a Solid Torus, Conductor 5, Genus for L Loci and Handlebody. His individual poems are widely published and appear in Abstract: Contemporary Expressions, Thirty West Publishing House, Amethys Review, Aaduna, Terror House Magazine, Night Music Journal, Castabout Art & Literature, Poetry Blue River, Horseshoes & Hand Grenades, Picaroon Poetry, Cantos: A Literary and Arts Journal, Rigorous, Beautiful Cadaver Project Pittsburgh, The Meadow, Juked, North Dakota Quarterly, Cathexis Northwest Press, The Sandy River Review, Strata Magazine, Brief Wilderness, Rue Scribe, Otoliths, Unlikely Stories Mark V, Lagom, The Charles Carter, Emrys Journal, Adirondack Centre for Writing, Cordite Poetry Review, Sonic Boom, Prune Juice Journal, Sijo: An International Journal of Poetry and Song, Atlas Poetica, Modern Haiku, Bones, Haiku Scotland, Modern English Tanka, Paper Wasp, Ginyu, Asahi Shimbun, Presence, Eucalypt, Ambrosia, Shamrock, Moonset, Frogpond, World Haiku Review, South by Southeast, Autumn Leaves, Simply Haiku, Haiku Reality, MASKS, red lights, Heron’s Nest, NOON: a journal of short poem, is/let, Acorn, Otata, Skylark, Ribbons, Hedgerow, Botsotso, New Contrast, Voices Israel, Reader's Digest, World Haiku Anthologies, Sun & Snow Anthology, Haiku 21, Catzilla, Albatross Haiku, Take Five: Best Contemporary Tanka, Failed Haiku, et al. He is an algebraist and artist and lives in the southern part of Ghana, Spain, and Turtle Mountains, North Dakota.

ekusenjournals.blogspot.com
kukubenkuka.blogspot.com
pinterest: @byiypublisher
tumblr: @byiypublishercollectionparadise
twitter: @byiypublisher
facebook: @jacobkobina.ayiahmensah