Onyedikachi Chinedu

Onyedikachi Chinedu
is a Nigerian poet. A reader for Non.Plus Lit.

I Believe

          After Jim Harrison

not a boy with a purse of bones, clammy face, wildflowers,
chaff on my cheek, sour soup, chipped hand,
the goat’s horn used in passing the old
wine to my mother’s husband,
staccato winds, plastic blueness, puritanical blues,
milk out from the table, boys under streetlights at 12 A.M.,
sex blossoming, a purgatory of red souls,
used condoms filled in a corner, the hag groans
throughout the witching hour, the grilled horse,
the whistle over the boy’s chapped lips, fireworks,
daggered skin, the woundedness of love, Coca-Cola,
horn & water, dinner at seven, bridged infatuations,
shirts & petticoats & shirts & infatuated longings for shirts.
then, it must have been fun to live through it all—
capsizing trembling ambitions.

Artless Bruise

your lips glossed the back like a wet figurine.
you hurt mother like years of black eyes & intentional, artless bruises. but, this time, you think her
unfurling over a hill: a kind in the mind & less her body.
in a charcoal-black goddess dress, you took in a child
whose twofold ached her being. more lackadaisical and painted like water,
you waterlogged dry areas and lacked that sheen of a polished oxford.