The music of birds in exile
With a line from Romeo Oriogun's poem: Cotonou
mama is not dead.
she sits under the plum tree beside my window.
she's a bird with prominent feathers. she's a girl of fifteen
she's just like me—broken and beautiful
her eyes are armed with letters from the past:
darts of war and hunger splitting the bowel of cities in halves
tonight, mama calls me by name: nkonye.
the river in her voice drowns the ache in my chest. her face wears
the iridescence of the moon. in her eyes a thousand shooting stars
spring with the weight of what they know—deep yearnings yolked in baskets of time.
on her hand, i trace planets of fresh warmth,
memories pulsating with every intake of breath—the first time
i said mama with the guttural inclination of a child
from her body i drank the first sun and morphed into a garden of promises.
mama's voice is a guitar pouring a sea of broken tones and semi-tones
the earth under our feet is a mouth sucking the secrets of the night
the wind drums the tale of bodies meshed in love and loss.
tonight, a trickle becomes a deluge
tonight, my body learns the music of birds in exile
she takes me through a door in her eyes and
we amble down a valley of bones—
a long line of women who gave up silence
to sing their loved ones to the afterlife
women who carried the world and their dreams on the bald field of their palms
tonight, my mother teaches me how to carry my dreams—
in jars of wet clay she mends the rift on my
tongue with her tears of supine pronouns and the verb-to-be
& weaves a new language from the butterflies ligning her teeth.
A girl is a mirror to many worlds, she says. a fine mix of blood and water and fire.
mama breathes into me and I become dough—
a pile of soft white thing she cracks open with her fingers.
i watch her knead me into several shapes—versions of myself tucked in a box
versions i revel in. she runs me through the furnace in her mouth
and i do not melt. she says a girl must be both silk and rock to
survive the manliness of the sun. it was dawn, and i rode into the sky with a smile.
Ewa Gerald Onyebuchi is an Igbo storyteller from Nigeria. He writes short stories and poems with a deep interest in queerness, sexuality as it relates to the body and feminism. He has been shortlisted and long listed for a couple of awards and contests, including but not limited to the Spring 2021 Starlight Award in Poetry, received an honorable mention in the L. Ron Hubbard's Writers of the Future Contest for the fourth quarter, 2022, a finalist in the 2022 NSSF righting our story contest, Ibua bold call in 2020 and 2022, the 2022 Spectrum Poetry Prize in 2022, 2022 Kendeka Prize in African Literature, the AUB international, poetry prize, 2022, the 2023 Abubakar Gimba Prize for creative nonfiction. Some of his works have been published or are forthcoming in the fantasy and science fiction magazine, efiko magazine, uncanny, the temz review, afritondo, brittle paper, and elsewhere.