Last Week, a Headline from the Punch Newspaper
Held Its Teeth on a Page of My Brain
& its thumbs glued to the corner of my eyes. the potus just
declared a halt on the hiv/aids relief coming to my country;
this means any moment from now aids might chew up the
landscape of my motherʼs red in her immune system. yes,
she tested positive—to the virus, & ólawale ólóforó playing
in the background. she held her bible close to a pane of my
thoracic vertebrae; she sucks my insipid body (that kept fever)
into her spongiform prayers. on the other hand, i was asking
the bible to escort my fear, of watching that thing excavate her
into her bones, to a groove—like a caudate nucleus on brown
sand. she tested positive to illiteracy; this means, she never
saw the headline with me. the next morning, i frequently
tweaked my lips to her view just for her to forget the 7 am
broadcast compressing the dim lights in the living room from
the tvʼs iridescence like orchestra pits. the hope that i have in
seeing her smile in the future, like a carillon becoming a
carillon when i cross the atlantic; when it crescendos with
every ding & reminds me of furrowing my brows to the
landscape of a greener pasture. this hope i have, that my mother
was not made to fade into a silent wind like a glass pot keeping
a tart solvent in its bowel. we knead the color of rhubarb leaves
to our palms in my homeland whenever we notice the universe
trying to rob us of a cool breeze coming to be solidified on our
bodies to become the warm demeanors that we bear. we enclose
our palms to the red of the rhubarb spread—that is the spiritual
cul-de-sac we curated for the universe, since what we make of
our hands is what is judged to be our own lives. mother, the
topography of your blood is where the architects of power
cannot stretch their papers on. the cartography of her veins is
what i can see in the layout of my hope, the place my smile
belongs. my [unnamed] country watches the curvilinear motion
of our tongues in a zombiesque fashion while she tries to feint
us—the walking dead.
—–
Poetry (c) Israel Okonji
Image: Copilot AI