Traveler.
Painting from Birmingham Museums Trust on Unsplash.
On my first journey across the mountains & hills
hawking the borders of my State,
I traveled in a sick white orange-stripped bus that kept sneezing smoke
& begging for stops to catch a breath.
The driver, an old man with a
scar like a whip across his jaw,
whistled Efik hymns through missing teeth
& spoke only when the silence grew heavy enough to break.
We passed water-logged villages
where goats & sheep outnumbered children
& laughter sounded like a thing forgetful of its name.
It was the birth of Harmattan, just about when my lips split like seeds of a flamboyant tree, so I carried
a tin of lip balm, cheap perfume, and a poetry chapbook with no spine,
the smell of home still fresh on my shirt.
Each borderpost smelled of green & suspicion.
At the giant bridge, stalking the road across the river, men with guns searched for bombs
but flinched at books.
In one town, the sun blinked like a tired god.
A boy asked if I was from the place
where rain never begs to fall.
I told him: No place like that exists.
He nodded, in knowing,
as if he too had learned
that every promise is a bribe with better grammar.
By dusk, the bus coughed its last breath
in a town where the road ended in smoke.
Okrikang.
The driver looked at me and said,
"Your feet know what wheels forget."
I walked the rest of the night,
thinking of borders not drawn on maps—
the ones in the body:
between breath & hunger,
between memory & myth,
between boy & man.
Art by Paul Blenkhorn on Unsplash.
Body Motion.
When the right leg falters,
the left steps in,
Do you now understand why body parts come in pairs?
This body—
my mother’s, my father’s,
a harvest of scars—
knows how to pivot
without breaking.
Bodies don’t collapse.
They redistribute pain
like people who’ve learnt
to carry too much
for too long.
This is a flat circle of adjustment.
Ancestral algebra.
Shift the sorrow.
Carry the joy.
Breathe through the wound
until it sings.
The shoulder learns
to be a cradle.
The knees become drums.
The spine, a prayer pole
hung with forgotten names.
Call it survival,
but know it is more.
This is the body becoming
language.
This is diaspora in motion.
This is the black body
remembering how to hold itself
with only one hand,
and still cook, still sing,
still praise,
still rise.
Still forgets how to break.
Painting from Europeana on Unsplash.
The Invention of Shorelines.
Who was the first to draw a border around a breath and call it a country? Who whispered into the ear of the ocean and told it to forget the names of the stolen? Who told the child born in a shack behind the cathedral that his skin was a burden and his tongue a trespass? Who taught gods to queue prayers and carry ledgers and march into jungles with crucifixes dipped in arsenic and pages lined with maps? Who told the sun to shine equally on slave ships and altars, and if memory is water, why does it drown only the survivor and not the man who poured the chains? If a people disappear beneath a doctrine, do they become scripture or silence, and what if the river never wanted to be discovered, what if it already knew its name but was too kind to spit it out and slice the tongue of the man who renamed it? What if the slave never boarded the ship, but the ship boarded the slave, dragged the flesh aboard, and demanded to be fed history in increments? What if Christ was just a metaphor for colonial appetite and the sermon on the mount was a contract written in invisible ink, and why do we still kneel to the echo of our whipped backs and call it redemption? Do you not see that the prayer has always been a translation error, that amen sounds suspiciously like acquiescence that we were not born into sin but into narrative, and narrative is how empires survive, “and so it was” is a guillotine for what came before, and if truth exists in fragments, then perhaps we were never meant to be whole perhaps our wholeness is a fiction sold beside mirrors and hymns, and doesn’t that mean we’ve been holy all along, fractured but divine crucified, not erased, orphaned, yet still naming ourselves daily in languages stitched from ash and thunder, and if I scream into the Atlantic, and it screams back, whose voice will history write down first and will it footnote mine or footstep over it, and will you still tell me the sea is neutral that the wind has no bias that discovery was accidental, that god did not know what he was doing when he arrived wearing a face that looked like yours?
Painting from the Art Institute of Chicago on Unsplash.
I watched a man smile
and thought it a lie, for we only smile because we do not know what else to do with the weight of our bones.
After Njoku Nonso.
of what use is living
if we're all moving
graveyards
—Njoku Nonso
i
I wake up this morning allergic to myself//
how strange//
to be present without permission.
ii
this body isn’t mine//
it’s a rented space with a broken lease//
& the landlord keeps knocking.
iii
I’ve buried people in my chest//
but they never stay dead//
they crawl in my ribs & laugh at my attempts to move on.
iv
you think you’re living//
don't you know
you’re just filling the time
until the grave catches up?
v
grief doesn’t wear black//
it wears the skin you’re still trying to scrape off//
you don’t mourn the dead//who lied to you?// you mourn the parts of you they took when they left.
vi
wounds don't heal//some become altars//some become rituals//isn't that why we feed faith to wolves?
vii
even as I do not trust my hand to keep me alive*//I do not fear death//
I fear being forgotten while I’m still breathing//
What’s the point of living if nobody remembers
you were ever here?
viii
I watched a man smile today
& thought//
that’s a lie//
we only smile because we don’t know what else to do
with the weight of our bones.
ix
I’ve held people in my arms who left
before they could say goodbye//
and somehow I’m still here//
waiting for the next batch to vanish.
x
I've been apologizing for my existence since birth//I’m tired of pretending that life is worth the sweat//
I've stopped begging for light//
I don’t want to survive//
I want to understand why I’m still breathing.
xi
I name my fears after years//I don't write so I won't rot in silence//that's another lie//I write to see
who's still alive inside me//faith broke my fall//now even my breath carries baggages// believe me// I
never prayed for a body that's a bruise dressed as a man.
xii
I'm dying in installments//I'm not healing//I'm only hiding the blood//I'm fluent at pretending so I'll
learn to cry without leaking//who said I asked to be a museum of pain?//my last prayer is simple but
who do I pray to if my mouth is the altar?
*I do not trust my body to keep me alive is a line from Njoku Nonso's “Appendages of Loss,” [Nigerian Newsdirect, 2021].
