Njoku Nonso

A Brief Teething of Grace

I warned you about crossing the border.
The red door stood between your skeleton

of a man & what gave the sea its beauty,
the blackness of it all. You said someone

had waved at you from the six feet depth
of that murky water, tiny, pianoing hands

raised against the blue, frozen sky,

& you believed there must be a lacquered box
of ruptured stars breathing under-water,

waiting for the longest stretch of your hands.
Like a dog reaching for its leash, you'd dropped

a slice of red meat & a befitting hook into the sea's
boundless skin, knees bruised from praying

for a fish to kiss it salvation, a brief teething
of grace. At the road's glorious end: a father

gifting a son a knife, a live fish writhing over
the kitchen wooden table like a fresh heart

nailed to cross. This is not the parable of the knife,
but of the fish who knows the end is near

& reachable when it's caught, like a special kind
of memory: a stray, whalish wolf licking its paw

in predatory wait. Knows this is how memory
grows dead through seeking a home that's

not yours, that can never be yours.

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Njoku Nonso is a Nigerian Igbo-born fiction writer, poet, essayist, and medical student, who lives and writes in/from Ojoto as a tribute to the spirit of Christopher Okigbo. His works are featured or is forthcoming in Brittle Paper, Animal Heart Press, Palette, Kissing Dynamite, Praxis and elsewhere. He's currently working on his first poetry chapbook.