I know you would rather read a poem about my hurts. About my father, his hands bent over like an axe, my splintered tooth, about a clenched fist & what it fractures the most. I know you like the way I curl on your desk. How flexible I've become always twisting, always a thing stepping on coals. I know you love me fiercely the way a critic loves a book. In little darkness, your light sparkles. I know you wish me well when you say show me, but at the mouth of my hurt, a door has opened. The insides, once a brushfire, now squats in the posture of water. And if you would look more closely at this poem, beautiful soul, you would see a horse. You would see a horse so weightless it slips through the distance masked as the wind.
Alzheimer, or Ode to Chicken Recipe
Chiwenite Onyekwelu
My grandmother had a tendency to forget the smallest things. Which is to say she didn't turn off the lights. The first time I got punched, she was all onion & garlic powder. As if the blood on my eyes was no blood at all. At the dinner table, I held my wound at tinsel angle just so she'd recall, but she did not. Every great mind, I've learned, would sooner or later feed itself. It's the way we self-destruct. The best joy about Alzheimer is now quickly it washes your regrets away, shampoos it, leaves you glowing like a shirt doused in some bleach. In the poem I'm scared to write, a boy my age dares God to take his memories if he were God enough. At twenty two, I know how old age is more freedom that it is the mouth of a jail. Take this wildness, give me a whole script set in reverse. Give me paprika & cayenne pepper. Give me coriander. I want to be a miracle as breathtaking as a wood hastening to ash. I want to be.
Chiwenite Onyekwelu is Nigerian and lighthearted. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Adroit, Chestnut Review, America Magazine, Gutter Magazine, and elsewhere. He was a finalist for the 2022 Gregory Djanikian Scholar in Poetry, as well as the 2021 New York Encounter Poetry Contest, winner of Jack Grapes Poetry Prize 2020, and runner-up for the Foley Poetry Prize 2020. He serves as Chief Editor at the School of Pharmacy Agulu, where he’s an undergraduate.