& they say Nigerian poets know only the dialect of grief & pain & scars but tell me how one can look at a building eating termites & not talk about its dance into woodrot. How much bandage can stop this festering, this wound devouring a country’s heart? Here, everything rusts.
This is the place where dreams die, where they are unborn, where they are stillborn. Where they unblossom
into loss. Where they unwither into memory because
to say something has experienced withering is to first
say that thing has tasted of life. & that taste is foreign
to this country’s tongue. Even this poem is a flower. Undone by the neck. Petals— seeking earth. Nigeria, graveyard.

BIOGRAPHY

Marvellous Mmesomachi Igwe is an aspiring poet from Port Harcourt, Nigeria and a student of Electrical Engineering at the Rivers State University. When he is not daydreaming or listening to his favorite singer Lana del Rey, he is trying to fashion a new line. He mainly writes about limerence, melancholia and the mundanities of existing. He tweets @mesomaccius.