is to let your feet stiffen into a pillar of salt,
to let them be torn apart, in
a room full of dehydrated men, pilgrims
advancing by faith, each seeking your temple key
each seeking kind admittance
each supplicant crooning passwords. Calling out.
Come, salt of the earth.
Open, sesame.
To want to run away from your own skin
is to let your body become a community of stories
your eyes, an over-flooded island
your mouth, the gates of a graveyard
your nose, a flute, piping soulful tones, dirge after dirge.
Your tongue, a beggar-girl’s bowl, forbidden
to reveal its face, overclouded by acne.
Your skin- a pleasant ripeness-
a burnt offering for men.
You want to cross those aching legs
you long for a brassier, but your nipples burn with sucking.
At a high school in the far North, a debate instructor points a chalk to
inscriptions on a blackboard and says,
you’ve got vagina, convince men,
get the things you want with the platinum tucked
within the folds of your other lips,
with the pearl inserted at the meetings of your thighs.
Which means to die is to want to soften your heart into
splattering under intense illumination.
Which means to die is to be birthed
with a stone stuck in your pudenda,
which means to want to down an overdose of pills is to
metamorphose into a dune
(or a bride awaiting child-marriage)
and lose yourself
to the sand storm, let it dictate your fortunes
let a windstorm whisper to your ear: C’est fini! C’est fini!
Chisom Okafor is a poet, Nutritionist and Dietitian, who was shortlisted for the Brittle Paper Award for Poetry in 2018 and the Gerald Kraak Prize of 2019. His works have been published or are forthcoming in Praire Schooner, the Indian Journal of Literature and Aesthetics, Rattle, Frontier Poetry, Palette Poetry, The 2019 Gerald Kraak Anthology (The Heart of the Matter), Kikwetu, The Rising Phoenix Review, The Single Story Foundation Journal, Sentinel Literary Quarterly, adda, Ghost City Review, Jacar One and elsewhere. He presently works as Chapbook editor for Libretto Magazine.
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