Poetry Suite by Nwuguru Chidiebere Sullivan
“my younger brother gets hold of a gun for the first time /
he begins to wish for a duel with a seven-eyed ghost"
Poetry by Nwuguru Chidiebere Sullivan
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Decimal Bodies
We cannot calibrate the pitch
of silence,
bones clattering into the melody of
this cold opera, hanging like cobwebs
all over my room.
Every night fetches me a rumpled Naira note
to prove how glamour glorifies hunting –
I recognize frivolity & assume ignorance.
Freedom is a toothache in the maw
of a boy who's fluent with the parlance of death,
he tattoos his fingerprints on the bare body
of the crescent moon, waiting for the day
the sky will crumble into his room
in provocation.
I have no business
with what hits my galaxy with blunt blows
in an attempt to disband me into an
imperfect logarithm, the wind fears no stab & the world
that finds it safe kneeling on my chest knows I'm pliable
from nine different spheres except for the one part
where grief seeps into me.
What is prayer, flaked with oatmeal
of burnt hope, immersed in a flagon of
sour faith that drains into me?
We cannot always measure the ductility
of this body with strain & grief as
constants, someday, like metal
I'll expand beyond the scope of the abyss
that spills me into ten decimal places
behind the last viable cypher.
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Lucid Testament for The Burns & Cuts Your Skin Leathers
"Different kinds of evil are available
& any one of them can kill you;
at any time anything can happen."
- Burna Boy
When my younger brother gets hold of a gun for the first time /
he begins to wish for a duel with a seven-eyed ghost /
The first time wealth scares him / he feels he's rich already / This was
how a vulture bragged about his preparedness / to halt the
rain & stop the sun / from caressing his bald head in the coming year
& we all wondered / if he has tailored a roof over his head this year /
You know the odd is already a bow tie / corking your whiff when your
feet / suddenly morph into a semblance of a deer's limbs / in the
eyes of your fellow poachers / We all know life here is a hunting sport / you
will survive as long as you keep dodging / the strays of honeyed bullets /
but you will lick it someday / & your taste buds will ignore
how long you've denied it of this taste / & you'll
come to know that / we're all casts filming our lives into memories / memories
that will later age into a catalogue or album / but before you get the
last chunk of the night / or tidbit the fresh bolus of each morning / always
remember that here in Nigeria / a sight of a new day is one of the
biggest testimony / Our nation is an aggregate of sharp objects like
knife / razor / scissors / bullets that cut through layers of lives every day /
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The Pity You Deny Us Builds Our Hearts Into Stones
To the boys clenching dull clouds with faith,
hoarding a graveyard underneath their tongues
& screaming silence
at the splinter of their Adam's apple
(manliness feigning ductility),
the tears you amass in your eyes are so broad
they can flood the whole universe.
the world barely cares
how masculinity is a permit for hawking trauma
until you afford to pomade your skin with anesthesia
& compose your gut into a cotton-mouthed country.
On my body
I tattooed a portrait of a bird with torn wings
& watched it struggle to escape muted melancholy,
this is the way I remind myself
of how brave it is to devour one's grief in silence
which shuts me into an insensitive closet
where quietude is golden.
Today, every boy like me lurks his flaw
as bootleg at night,
a shawl of insensitivity which
the world graces our gender with
to feign beauty from cracks
& assume fragility as ductility.
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Drawbacks
i dreamed of love.
of two halved bodies rounding up
to a nearest whole digit
without first unmasking the pronouns
or unbuttoning the victims,
but
fantasies are the easiest way to rustle
one's eyes into the burning brooks.
i proposed this body to the assay of fervor
because i wanted to believe the doctrine
of weakness, which was a way
of betraying the stamina that ails
a boy's body. I leapt into the middle
of this, to omit the gravity of love & the surprise
that its aftermath offers, but i was ashamed
to witness how this river skipped mastication
to consume everything i was or thought
of becoming. with bruised lips, i returned
as the bare cakewalk, unsure of how
a smile became a dash spacing me
from the closest breakdown. every lyric
x-rays the cackles of my bones as a
slip of tongue with the way i now pronounce
love. but isn't love apoptosis of strength?
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Header photograph courtesy of Devin N. Morris. To view his Photographer Feature, go here.
Nwuguru Chidiebere Sullivan is a keen writer from Ebonyi State, Nigeria. He is a penultimate medical student and a Forward Prize nominee who makes poems from everything he can't stammer through speeches. He has works published or forthcoming at Shore Poetry, Journal Nine, Inverse Journal, Rabid Oak, The Lake, IS&T, Disquiet Art, Dreich Mag, B'K Mag and several other places.
He can be reached out on Facebook @NwuguruChidiebereSullivan, and on Twitter @wordpottersull1
