Jane Akweley Odartey
Sunday Afternoon

It smells like cupcakes because the candle
is made to smell cupcake like. Under it
there're onions and spicy peppers. Not
under the candle. Stop smelling under the
candle. It's under the scent of the candle.

Diced, they fried in olive oil with Korean potatoes
and a shy splash of sea salt. That was lunch, this
is poetry. Prose is milk and poetry is a tall cup of
fine, thick milkshake. But that was dessert.
It had cubes of caramel at the bottom, which is

what's left now--I don't want them. I want only
what Coltrane's playing, "My Favorite Things."

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Jane Akweley Odartey is a Ghanaian-American writer, abstractionist, artisan and a local teaching artist at the Queens Museum in NYC. Her work has appeared or is forthcomingin Dryland, CALAMITY, Verity La and elsewhere.

>> Back to Issue 21, 2018