NJOKU NONSO
CW – death
Common Ground
poetry finalist in our 2020-2021 Writing Contest
What name do you give a predator to tame
its devouring? Maybe I couldn’t lift the blade
even with its gold-plated skin, not as a matter
of wonder or weight, or a leaf of memory
scissored into peculiarity like a thumb of hot ash
pressed into the church of a tongue. But for
the language gone extinct, weathering itself upon
my hair. How much of this language is enough
language? The answer is a heaving in the dark,
a sky of mirrors, lungs of trees, a white shiver
on the TV screen—everything that haunts the rip
between elevation and flight. I am afraid to sing
again the blade’s mythical anger, its verses of
slaughter having an unsatisfactoriness for blood—
birthing as the miracle of touch, the quick passage
of light through shadows—an uncommon kind
of hungering. How much of memory is enough
memory? A tower of candlelight. A faltering harp.
An unshadowing of a forgotten world. Say no
property remains hidden forever. Say a blade
in my hand means a brother’s jaw cut open like
an unbuttoned shirt, means raging beast ungodly,
means there’s a face behind the face we all know.
A searching in the dark can lead to many doors.
Re-bruised
I perform aloneness with the animal urgency
of death calls & barbecued longings, a husk
of pure light squeezed out of its own conforming.
The angle of incision: a half-eaten star on
my right arm, re-bruised—a lilting in the sky’s
kingdom of blue. Lord, please spare me this
lectern of mercy to keep humming against
my own rusting, to praise the fig tree teething
beside the stranger’s makeshift grave—regur
& pitcher, achondrite & tickering knoll—
& not unbraid my tongue into grief’s tabernacle.
Noah’s pinnace upturned by a Jericho of flood.
Yet the symphony’s never enough therapy:
all those trees, the severed valves & rosettes—
who would not think of torrential agony? But
isn’t agony sometimes necessary to measure
the size of our loyalty? Through the glass eye,
every twinge remains immaterial: a white crane,
a fast entropy of fallen leaves heaved up from
the front porch like a gyration of tongues—
in the midst of it all: a guitarist’s hands quivering,
too old to play a song, too old to play any song—
Njoku Nonso is a Nigerian Igbo-born poet, essayist, writer of fiction, and medical student, who lives and writes in/from Ojoto as a tribute to the spirit of Christopher Okigbo. His works has been featured or is forthcoming in Bodega, Momento: An Anthology of Contemporary Nigeria, Rising Phoneix Press, The Shore, Brittle Paper, Kissing Dynamite, Praxis and elsewhere. He’s a Pushcart nominee, a Semifinalist for Jack Grapes Poetry Prize and a finalist of Open Drawer Poetry Contest. He’s currently working on his first poetry chapbook, and still loving stray dogs. Hook up on twitter @NN_Emmanuels