FINDING GOD
For Faustina
Sometimes, I watch you from across the room when you are not looking;
Hoping to catch you without the halo that effuses from your skin like spears
Of sunlight. But it is like wondering if the body does breathe while it sleeps.
As fleeting as the nightingale’s song, I have seen god materialise from these
Pervious walls of your earth-coloured skin that houses triangles of light polaroids.
First it was when your lips havened into the shape of my name
And coughed it into a song borne by the wind. I saw god waft through the room,
Past the bodies—heads and soles, past the glass windows, into an aperture in my chest.
The room shifts, then expands and folds into a cupid. I reach for you, but I only catch
Echoes of your skin, floating like a rain of confetti.
The night we walked in the moon’s banquet, our bodies imbibing terraces of light,
I listened to your laughter break like glass, each splinter holding a reflection of you,
I saw you in fragments: lips, eyes, fingers, each floating like scattered stars,
Singing the same familiar song. Something about your melody roused a miracle
Within me—this same body which they say is impermeable to wonders.
I do not know how you have managed to paddle god into this grief-riddled body
Of mine—this same body that was carapaced in self-weaponry now tempers at the
Mention of love. I am confused at how therapy can be concealed within walls of skin.
Call it euphoria, but this therapy has annealed the lesions etched on my skin and
Bleached my emptiness to the color of your favorite flower, stained by the moonlight.
Call me prophet, I know what I have seen. So when I make you my sanctuary,
It is because there is something sacred/divine within your walls; so let me worship there.
We must again perform the sunset ritual. That ritual of songs where I’ll carve my prayers
Into the shape of your laughter and watch god break out of the temple of your body and
Break into Mine.
A BOUQUET OF DYING THINGS
I / Necrosis
We mostly do not speak of the things that are gradually collapsing inside us.
How these grandiose walls you see, now bind nothing but dying, atretic cells.
How these love-worthy bodies have morphed into body bags holding so much
Deadness within. Everyday, a flower wilts in this garden. Everyday, a cell dies—
Ii / Apoptosis
These fragments of me can no longer hold together.
So, they help me carry this cross I cannot carry, for my mother’s sake —suicide.
Sometimes, it is my faith, shrinking at the edges, dogeared like the overused
Pages of an old book. But tell me, what isn’t overused about my faith?
Other times, it is my pain receptors. These things that exfoliate grief slowly
In a body. Now, I can sit in the mouth of grief and barely utter a word.
I am gradually folding up like a book. Shrinking—
That same thing that happens to the amniotic sac, the water sachets,
After you have siphoned out their lives.
What heat does to tenderness, to beauty is the beginning of death.
Iii / Inflammation
I am staring at a stubborn plexus of pus-filled pimples; these scabs
Of dry tissue that has held on to the seams of life since puberty.
I have prayed that these ugly cells disappear. I have picked, excoriated,
Stabbed at these protrusions, but they keep sitting on my skin in defiance.
They teach me that death begins with the things inside; the things
That we shroud from the light; these things that are layered beneath beauty.
Say, beauty is like cotton candy in the mouth. I fear that when
You slit me open with a scalpel, all that greets the nakedness of your eyes is
A bouquet of dying things.
Iv / Sepsis
I have learnt that growth just like death,
Is about the inside things; that we are all seedlings and we must die
To become the beautiful. So, you see? Don’t snap your fingers and swing over
Your head at the mention of death. Sometimes, death is a beautiful thing…
But some of us have learnt to bury ourselves, and still not die.
A BOY DOES NOT BECOME A MAN
When he wears his father’s coat…
As usual, I cannot decipher these things,
—how I am always chewing the things that are bigger than my mouth
How like shadows that cradle tiny bodies of light,
The things that enshroud me are always larger than my gauche frame
Very soon, I’ll wake up wearing a coat the size of my father’s.
How I got it, I do not know.
There are things I dread so much: waking up one day and I can no longer
Let my laughter erupt from the fissure of my mouth
And burst open like a vesicle, or weep before your naked eyes;
Or let my grief unfurl and diffuse through my pores, daubing the sky;
And not have someone ensure my testicles are intact/unscathed
—this is the coat my father wears, and his father before him —Ahamuefule.
…
How much more will I inter in this body of mine?
To be a man is to gather these little, big things & embalm them in fortitude
To wear sobriety like a string of beads around your neck;
To have a knife to your throat, yet not make a sound —valour,
To swallow the bullet and die with a smile —heroism.
These things are alien to me. I swear, they unnerve me.
This thing, I fear it will thread me into a box of silence.
…
Today, I unwear my manliness like some strange garment and bury it
Within this poem. Let the things that should be, be.
I tear these beads of sobriety that festoon my neck, even these dams of fortitude.
Take my father’s coat and give me something that will not subdue this body.
Let the things that should be, be.
Victor Chịmbọ is an emerging poet and essayist who lives in South-Eastern, Nigeria. His works have featured in The Caravans, ChristAPoet, Afrịka and Lillies’ Mag. When not writing poetry, he’s somewhere in medical school learning to be a physician. He’s on X as @TheVictorChimbo.
Cover photo credit: izzet çakallı