It’s here. The smell of decay pervades the town. We had corpses as mango seeds corset on the brown; hoping the first family unfolds like fingers of a spring flower. I break the loaves of bread to seven unequal halves: two for the man who bodies the filament; five for all the whitish beams of the Rising Sun. The war holds an eerie plot of napalm water. The war brings a kaput place to those quarters of fresh, flowing brackish. I heard, in the drums, you could find skulls drinking from the banks; giggles from the branches; octaves of a forgotten fraternity seep through ground and skin. Often the river is nothing within blood and food. there, in the room facing east, my mother told stories of the river. Tenderness is the surface tension, she said; and water, like a mirror, reflects breathless ghosts. Each gulp, like a photograph, parrots the cries of every one tethered to the block.

About The Author

Onyedikachi Chinedu is a poet living in Port Harcourt, Rivers State. He was the winner of the 2018 Kreative Diadem Annual Creative Writing Contest (poetry category); his works are published in Kreative Diadem and Mementos: An Anthology of Contemporary Nigerian Poetry.