content warning: reference to suicide and queerphobia.
trophy
for the ones who went because they felt unwelcome…
it’s the break of day, & I’m to select clothes for my sister’s body – an anatomy versed
in frigidness, whisked off earth’s skin. it’s official: I’m the only branch left. eighteen years
of storytelling concluded with the undoing of her wrists.
I lay in bed, thoughts sprouting in my head, wondering if to interpret
the looks splayed on my parents’ face as relief.
last night, she flooded my dreams with ululations. her diary on my nightstand, a register
of her existence; how people sneered at her
for being wrinkled [ not straight].
it’s knotty to sentence my hands to a selection. no, I’m uninterested in nourishing the earth
with her body. if she couldn’t breathe environed by teeming oxygen, why offer
her to a world that dubbed her a contamination? I want her body
cremated with the fire from the gleaming sun & her urn on my shelf like a trophy.
Praise Osawaru (he/him) is a writer and poet of Bini descent. A Best of the Net nominee, his works appear in Blue Marble Review, Glass Poetry, Ice Floe Press, Kalahari Review, Kissing Dynamite, and elsewhere. He’s a 2020 Jack Grapes Poetry Prize Finalist, Babishai 2020 Haiku Award and 2020 Nigerian Students Poetry Prize shortlistee, and a recipient of the NF2W Poetry Scholarship. He’s a prose reader for Chestnut Review and he’s on Instagram/Twitter @wordsmithpraise.
