Njoku Nonso

The Harvesting of Grief

I must be born specially for this kind of dying.
Teach me how to teethe all the boundless skin

of my grief & not break open into sad eulogies,
a small, fragile thing put into the grave

of my mouth like a Mercy. Something bad
must happen, but to whom? Halved by a predator's

basic instinct, a man walks into an empty parkland,
hungry for what slithers through the peephole

of a coffin, & strips naked. There's no God
watching us, he says. He pours ten litres of fuel

over his head & drowns in a sea of shouting fire.
This is how I know what the thirst for happiness

can become when not severed, cut off
like a rotting arm, the ancient theory of loving

a body hard enough to kill it. How long we have
waited for a speeding train, the hot tongue

of a bullet, to save us from this world of
unquenchable thirsts? Nobody knows where

this poem ends because it moves in the direction
of the wind the way a balloon takes up to the sky

& nobody knows where it's headed. Today I'll walk
into the same parkland & get drunk watching

a large settlement of busy vultures over his dead corpse.
Because the body always find new ways to remember,

I'll eat a large bowl of spaghetti & quite a handful
of sleeping pills to survive the night. There's no difference

between nightmare & prayer. Do not be afraid.
Understand survival: like heartbeat, begins just after it ends.

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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.