Antony Fangary is a writer and visual artist living in San Francisco. He was awarded the 2023 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and is the author of HARAM (Etched Press 2019). His work has received support from the San Francisco Arts Commission, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and the Center for Cultural Innovation.
dear england
i told a sa/idi joke at my grandfather/s eulogy
imagine that
a room full of egyptians
mourning and laughing in english
speaking your spill/motor oil silting
we hear you in every word/england
strung out in the room
gripping a map of africa with one hand
a butter knife in the other
scraping names
blotting lines
gidu told me an english soldier killed his father after the occupation
two generations later
we are in this room
jowls marred
by that same bullet
your language
always held like heavy rocks in gidu/s mouth
wilted his words into flaps of themselves
he would call me khoaga
laugh at my weak tongue
and i think of shells
splitting cobras
my family from the mouth
