Relational Geography

By Claudia Owusu | From Prairie Schooner – Summer 2026

Explore: Poetry

My aunt knew she was marrying the wrong man
when she dreamt every meal she cooked burnt black

on the stove, caught a vision of herself,
pregnant and weeping. Dutiful niece,

I pocket the story, try to fit it firmly into verse.
But it only goes so far. How to be the kind of person

God shows his hand? At a concert,
I pick up a woman’s son though she has not asked.

In the morning, I awake to a child crying
in the next room, the incessancy bleeding

into that of a rooster’s crow downstairs.
My own tears have no singularity.

I cry from the sidewalk to the shower
to the taxi to the beach. I retrace

my aunt’s “and thens” and become tender
in all the unnameable places. I am browning slowly

and then the food burned, and then I was pregnant,
and then I was weeping.

Claudia Owusu is a Ghana girl through and through. As a writer and filmmaker, her work divulges the nuance of Black girlhood through a personal and collective lens. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in the Offing Mag, Chestnut Review, Ninth Letter, Bellingham Review, and elsewhere. Her documentary film Ampe: Leap into the Sky, Black Girl has screened internationally at Aesthetica, the New York African Film Festival, Urbanworld, and Blackstar Fest. She is the author of the chapbook In These Bones I Am Shifting from Akashic Books. She holds an MFA in creative nonfiction from the Ohio State University.