[the one with the lesson]

Neighbor six steps from the hilltop crosses us mid-walk and yes, he is. Says I look like a young Bill Cosby and yes, he is. Says he has to listen to a talk later about women in education and doesn’t know what they have to teach him and yes, he is. We bite our tongues, bite each other’s tongues, taste each other’s red and walk away and yes, he is. The late Ama Ata Aidoo’s protagonist in Our Sister Killjoy called them the people with the color of “pickled pig parts.” 1955 is dead but he hasn’t managed to escape it. The Jurassic exists in retrospect, in textbooks, in museum bones and the bones of birds and yet he hasn’t come to clear the sphagnum from his toes and descend. Parachutes are expensive, power lines are everywhere and yet. He works as a tutor, others say, a former teacher. He’s missing several pages, the one with the lesson that neighbor is not a designation but a question devoured or spit out by the taste encounter leaves. Saturday’s abandoned cud at the corner for the pig who crossed our path was our answer.