Exiled

By Akpa Arinzechukwu 

I dip a finger in the deep ocean
just to reach you.

Your absence ebbs me
towards the improbable.

I wake up again
in a body no longer mine,

an identity on a reckless person’s table.
The butcher, muscular than all my nightmares,

hammers on the id first, the wings lastly –
that no matter how courageous the bird is,

it can never fly over the Atlantic, neither
ever could it drink from it – it is

all fleeting for a bird, squawking towards oblivion –
no more than a thought in a dying person’s mind.

& what I mean is that the world I left for you
is the one I still want. Of course, with you.

What I mean is given the opportunity
I might still ride on my assassin’s bullet

just to get to you again – lay naked by the pool,
your hand in mine, our breaths trembling

with the harmattan’s wind because we can. I
mean my killer might have been there all that time

but because we were too busy thinking about God
we became gods that we didn’t notice at our altars

were spoilt fruits, rotten fleshes, offered to us
by unsatisfied worshippers. What it means is

humans determine the usefulness of a god, &
darling the crowd that has seen their god

bowing at the altar of another man
might as well demand God be exiled.

I am an exiled crow at the mercy of a butcher.
No matter how much I sing of his beauty,

his curly hair, well groomed beards, &
the softness of his big palms,

he still picks offence. Habibi,
are you a bit worried the least a stranger

could do for you is what he is principled to not do?
Yes, it doesn’t hurt to let a dying bird swim

to its ancestors through its sea of blood.
The butcher wants my silence, I want what you have –

the land of our first kiss, the weather of our first sex,
your mother’s hand on your forehead, praying,

while you sleep. I want to be taken serious in a land not mine.
We can only be fluent in one language. I language for longing.

Nights as snow fences this building the image clearest to me
is the hour hand of time unzipping me, pressing lips to mine.

Lord, I am so lonely in my aloneness the only vowel I have
is the deep breath escaping the prison of my nasal cavity.

I want the calm that returns to a child’s face when it is breastfed.
Which of you have seen a tree growing by the waterside?

BIO:
Akpa Arinzechukwu is an Igbo writer. Their work has appeared in Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, The Southampton Review, Poetry Review, Adda, Fourteen Poems, Arc Poetry, and elsewhere. They were a finalist for the Black Warriors Review Fiction Contest 2020.