I am tired of flaying myself
and covering my raw, pink flesh

in the pelt of a poem; of vomiting
viscus, hollowing myself out to make space

for prosody; of levering the muscles
of my throat so a paean of pain may pour

out. I am tired of the monotone
macabre, of my sadness

scratched in blood. Every poem I write
is the exsanguination of my body, etched

into my flesh. As if I have not been branded
enough. Still the blood ink runs clear in the light.

In your glazed gazes my reflection is curved
by the cliché of self-indulgence. My trauma,

a self-indulgence. I gorge myself with memories
so when the time comes for me to be spun

on a spit, you may grow lean off the body poem.
This body poem is not a balanced diet. To eat

of me is to eat into starvation.
I eat of elegies and into starvation.


I plume pain in poesy and pretend
this envois it out of existence


“The Last Trauma Poem,” is the winning entry for the 2024 Akachi Chukwuemeka Prize for Poetry.

Biography

H.B. Asari is a Niger Deltan writer. Her fiction was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Short Stories Prize 2023 and has appeared in Voyage, Strange Horizons, FIYAH, and adda. She is a Pushcart-nominated poet, has been shortlisted for the Climate Change Poetry Prize 2022and won the Stephen A. Dibiase Poetry Prize. Her poetry has been published or is forthcoming in FIYAH, Ake Review, Fantasy Magazine and Consequence’s Forum. You can find her on Instagram as @draft_oroguitas.