When she passes
our table a third
time evading
eye contact,
everyone mentions
Evelyn’s big butt,
even the Swedish
Queen Mother from Edumafa.
It’s inevitable,
as she brushes by
again without requesting
dinner orders
that our impatience will
terminate restraint.
The Mongolian economist
sighs, grunts even,
and then
recollection—
the year Evelyn was
pregnant. Other
conversational strains
drop away. The tired
reporting of
taxi accidents,
of rising pineapple
prices, of staying
up all night
with a neighbor’s child,
sick with malaria.
In its absence,
the Dutch optometrist summons
long forgotten
high school physics
to account for
an expectant Evelyn’s
utter defiance
of all laws of gravity,
balance, volume, mass,
distribution of
what have you.
Someone likens her passes
to a matador’s
tandas in a bullring.
“They come in threes.”
The hour ticks
away. Each of us groups
her comings and goings
into these multiples,
none of us wanting
to consider
how numb
our rears have grown
in these hard,
intolerant chairs
until Evelyn finally
takes a last
and final tanda,
“We’ve run out of food.”
Cape Coast, Ghana
Laban Carrick Hill was the author of more than thirty books, including the 2004 National Book Award Finalist Harlem Stomp!, which he researched for nearly a decade, and America Dreaming, which examines the legacy of the 1960s. He taught writing at Columbia University, Baruch College, St. Michael’s College and Pine Manor College in Massachusetts. He was also the cofounder and codirector of the Writers Project of Ghana, based in the US and Ghana. He passed away in 2021.
