IN ZION
Read this as a mother in white robes
whispering names to a bottle of anointing oil.
Your words are tumbling over each other
every breath stretching to infinity, to zero.
Read this as a child tattooing the image
of a whimpering parent
on her skin. Read this as a teenager clutching her Bible
& choking on a chorus. Bless the Lord, O my.. my..
Testament of broken songs and lungs.
Read this as a bullet
weaving through the atria of a rosary.
Read this as a rosary
falling, spinning, like an asterisk losing its wings and legs.
Read this as a pair of brown legs
running away, zigzagging through gates, falling into a portrait
of the Red Sea, into an interchange of crisis and the cosmos.
Read this as a man in the cross
head tilted to the left, legs bent to umbilicus
blood dancing a gig on the tongue
lips making a caesura of the silence in Zion.
home is here
I. in between the jabs and punches and safety of shadows, i explain to my kids how dreams shine better when broken like communion bread. i teach them to recite the Kyrie eleison over and over again because i was taught that life and death are in the power of the tongue and when they point out that my tongue and the rest of my body are antonyms i reply that a body is meant to be marooned in sizzling contradictions – what is a body if not a blancmange of errors?
II. i know how the sky can be when it holds the sun for too long. i am aware of how longer days can bring danger & i am aware the longer i’m awake the harder my bones fall like failed origamis like pyrex against concrete & i am aware that hope is a swirling bubble that breaks on water on grief on bones whose owners fled from their bodies & i am aware that my country is a cocktail of flags and honor stained with blood. my kids ask me why my French tastes like burnt pies, why my Spanish hides my tongue in holes. they ask me where my identity is buried and as I try to answer, my throat cells fold into extinction. how do you describe the anatomy of loss to a child? this sacred space where our histories are stored before decaying into stuffy libraries, do you call it a tomb? and this compressed air of happiness sucked into a void, do you call it the future?
III. but i explain that home is a chaff of radio waves, a TV ad. and in the explanation, there is an underlying anger frosted with helplessness. i explain that home is an album of laughs wrapped in white and black. home is the queue at the country’s border. home is a duffel bag of tears and trash. home is a stigma of stars dripping with ash. and sometimes, home is right here, a falling castle wedged between foreign languages.
to change a skin
here/people don’t die/they just become dry sprigs of amber/bodies bleached to the color of tombs/shadows of tattered wonders/you see them/on TV/small, petite figures/sandbagged into ashy headlines/“nobody died in the bomb blast”/here/bodies don’t die/ they just change skins/ from pulsing pores/to maroon urns/to leafy pages/of a newspaper/tell me mallam/how do you blend bones/into a suya wrap?/do you peel off the flesh first/and feel the throes of veins?/or do you mold numbers into formalin/ use them as preservatives?/“21 injured/6 shot/0 dead?”/here/bullets are surgery pills/we need them to escape/to metamorphosise/to clone our bodies/into burnt artworks/because/here/what makes men/undead/is a little metal/swinging in their bellies/
Author’s Biography
Overcomer Ibiteye is a Nigerian poet and writer. Shes a fellow of the SprinNG Writing Fellowship. Her works have appeared in a variety of anthologies and magazines such as the Land Luck Review, Iskanchi, Scrawl Place Magazine, Starline Science Fiction and Poetry Magazine , African Writers Space and others. She was shortlisted for the African Writers Awards (2021), the Calanthe Collective Prize for Unpublished Poetry (2022) and the Spectrum Poetry Contest (2022).