Mgbabor Emmanuel Chukwudalu
grief as a souvenir
imagine holding a shovel to your trachea,
clueless. imagine trapping a blade
in the closet of your fist, clueless, & watch
your palm bloom into a cauldron of red.
quiet reader, i must confess, every poem
is a rot stretching in the brain: a graffiti
of ache. every night, i balm the wound
spreading on my chest & it blues into
a shimmering lake. so when i say i am
an arrow shot through the neck of grief,
i mean grief, too, is a tangible thing.
say, how do you uproot the ache & spare
the boy// & not shatter this body fumbling
for a chapel of grace? i am twenty
& the stars no longer shelter my dreams.
don’t you think i am too young to perform
grief like a well memorized script?
i sit in the corridor of this verse, combing at
my eyeballs with a scythe, till they rainbow
into something beautiful. maybe
i am just as absurd as the metaphor.
even the syllables of this poem are too
brittle to swallow without drawing blood.
i hold this ache as a specimen under
a microscope. sometimes, all grief does is
to kiss a gun barrel to the roof of a mouth,
& watch the cerebrum become an
outburst of beautiful confetti.
mother, i became a burning city overnight
—for Ernest Ogunyemi
mother, i am alive again
in the palm of this poem/ my tears are
crystals shattering on the windowpane/
like a swatted roach, a skylark falls off my
chest/ dead/ the grenade of grief exploding
in my marrows/ i swear,
a lot has changed in me since God
pruned you off my life/ i skipped sunday
masses twice because each time
the holy communion kisses my tongue,
it morphs into hot coal/
sets me ablaze/ drags fire down
my throat till i become a burning city/
truth is: i have paid more attention
to the music in my bones/ & struck my
veins like guitar strings/ my tear glands
have grown hunchbacks from carrying paradoxes/
mother, there are days i want to give myself
to the arms of a noose & hiccup
my life/ to feel death’s hook reach for
my chest & beg the flesh to peel itself into
a wound:
a body becomes Titanic navigating
the Atlantic for a home/ the iceberg of grief
crashing into its ribs/
mother, the best i could do for you is
to pluck a poem & gift it a voice/ thrice,
i tore this poem & fed it to grandma’s goats/
fed them the storm/
but i promise to keep this one/ to hold it
as a souvenir/ each time my body begs
for a bosom to crawl into.