Bryan Joe Okwesili

Bryan Joe Okwesili
is a chocolate loving realist. A poet and storyteller keen on telling diverse African stories. He writes from Anambra, Nigeria. His art have appeared on SmokeLong Quarterly, Brittle paper, Cypress, Lunaris, Expound, Kalahari review, African writers and elsewhere.
He is currently a student of law at the University of Calabar, Calabar.
is a chocolate loving realist. A poet and storyteller keen on telling diverse African stories. He writes from Anambra, Nigeria. His art have appeared on SmokeLong Quarterly, Brittle paper, Cypress, Lunaris, Expound, Kalahari review, African writers and elsewhere.
He is currently a student of law at the University of Calabar, Calabar.

I HAVE A STORY IN MY HEAD

Come, tell me about unhappiness,
I have a story in my head.

It begins with my eyes,
and ends with my eyes.
I have seen a boy hide behind a door to
to burn inside another boy. He says it is love.
My father disagrees. He finds me in another boy and
tries to misspell my name on my back with a rod.
Mother erases it with balm, and a rainbow appears.

I have seen my brother’s closet twice.
It is always clean but empty. Mine is filled with
things mother says father must never see.
So, I stay inside, until father comes knocking.
I never open.

I have seen a boy taste berries of a girl and
spit it out. He knows it is not his.
Cucumbers are better.
I write my girlfriend’s name in BLOCK letters.
Only mother can read lies.

What do you do when you can’t remember
to love a girl, not a boy?

I hug mother every morning. I am her son.
I know only the night wears darkness so perfectly well
like my father. He approaches me and I think it
wants to rain. I cannot see his face.
I can only hear my voice
                                             b
                                                 r
                                             e
                                                 a
                                              k
                                                  i
                                              n
                                                 g.

WHO CAN TOUCH GOD?

You smear a red,
then an orange,
then a yellow,
then a green,
then a blue, indigo, violet.
Your fingers touch God.
You raise your painting to your mother.
She breathes a smile, “A beautiful rainbow.”
“No,” you disagree. Your eyes shoot at her.
“This is God with filters,
and a boy with painted toe nails,
and a girl sewn in a suit with padded shoulders,
and a father’s beard thickening into a burnt grassland,
and a mother’s first joke to her child about his penis,
and a community trying to know why God hides behind colours.”

Your mother looks at you.
Her eyes do not know how to clothe worry.
“Do you have a fever?”
You retract like a snail. Your shell is so smooth, so small,
you call it a closet.
“I am fine,” you say, washing God off your fingers with water. And tears.

 

TEARS ARE HOW I SAY, “IT HURTS.”  

here i lie, shut in.
an ungainly sprawling creature,
foggy-eyed, feeling myself leave myself
through a cut on my wrist; a crimson waterfall.
cuts are how i say, “i am tired.”
tears are how i say, “it hurts.”
there is no one here but air.

once, i lent my jaws to the people in
the streets. they returned it, singing the
psalms of a hangman.
how do you love a country and hate it’s people?

in my dreams, like enjambments, i run
over words ‘they say’ qualify a boy who eats
cucumbers between the thighs of his fellow
man– homo. fag. gay. me.

in my mouth, are eggs; oval shaped rainbows.
take them to Gomorrah, no one is there too,
that they may hatch into shiny remnants of me.
home is a place with memories.

leave my eggs here and watch them morph into–
I. desires twisted into a wreath.
II. pain. more pain.
III. a news headline of a lonely boy who
knew how to hide his scars and look like
a loved child.