Writer’s Block is RVA Magazine’s Sunday series highlighting contemporary writers working in Richmond and across the Commonwealth. Each week, we feature original poems, short stories, or essays. Just real voices writing right now.
This week we’re featuring two poems by Mary Beth Cox, a former Peace Corps volunteer (1999-2001, Togo) living in Chesterfield and working in Richmond. The poems draw on moments from the beginning and end of her service, exploring distance, identity, service, small mistakes and big realizations abroad and at home.
If you’d like to be featured, send your work to hello@rvamag.com with the subject line “Writer’s Block.”
The Gathering
by Mary Beth Cox
They called us back to Lomé for Y2K.
We had only finished training just two weeks ago
and had been driven to our villages
in the back of white landcruisers,
bouncing down the rutted Togolese dirt roads.
We had spent Christmas in the best way we knew how,
with strangers, barely able to converse confidently in French.
We were eager to get started.
What did Y2K have to do with us?
We stayed once again at the Peace Corps hostel,
slept once again on mismatched sheets
under mosquito nets that were not our own,
and drank Lion Killers at the bar next door.
We smiled to see each other again;
somebody had sparklers (brought from America?)
and it was just us in the hot, dry yard
under the clear sky full of stars.
The bright hazy Milky Way made an appearance.
How could Y2K reach us, we wondered,
in this very far-away country
that few people in the computerized world
had even heard of?
We played Psychiatrist for hours
in a large screened-in gazebo,
sitting in a circle so we could all see each other
and waited for the end of the world
as we knew it.
The Togolese Soccer Match
by Mary Beth Cox
I am entirely across the universe
from my previous life. Inverted.
Sitting at the center of an African tribunal
of chiefs holding court for a soccer ball.
The soccer match lasted all day
and went off without a hitch.
The health workers did skits
educating the crowd about safe sex.
The purpose: HIV awareness.
All the eager young men earned
the opportunity to play in this game
with a real, new, shiny soccer ball.
They would play in this village
of Melamboua, in this country of Togo;
names of places that are unfamiliar
to most people in the world.
We might as well be residents
of a different type of planet —
breathing dirt, drinking sky,
and eating snakes and large rodents.
Today the players wore real uniforms.
There was an air of caring for each other.
The women sold drinks and hot food.
Somebody secured a megaphone.
The men and boys played so hard
like they were in the World Cup;
as a storm brewed to the south, a team won!
So I rewarded them with the Real Ball.
Except that was wrong; I offended
everybody else as the rain began to pour.
They were from out of town. Aliens. Invaders.
Seen as undeserving Outsiders.
How was this a faux-pas?
Why would I not give the ball to them?
They are not aliens to me. That little
white planet has caused such a big fuss.
The council seated around me glares,
reminding me that I’m an alien too.
Foreign. Ignorant. Big-headed.
I will never be this version of myself again.
Photo by Jasmin Ne
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