I must be a god the way I keep tiptoeing out of death,
like the miracle of clouds fleeing the sky.
My palms spread out in prayer like the legs of a cheating wife:
Father, take this cup of suffering from me,
and give me a pitcher filled with the nectar
that sun-yellows a flower into laughter.
This prayer sits on my tongue every morning, like the sun wooing my grief out of hibernation,
& I cry out to you in the urgency with which a rooster announces the dawn.
It is the Lenten season again.
Holy Thursday plays me a recording of Jesus dissecting the anatomy of his body:
Take this all of you and eat of it, this is my body given for you. Do this in memory of me.
In my country, a boy is persecuted for searching for a Eucharist in another boy.
Which is to say that a boy who likes boys is a body bejewelled with napalm.
In a manner of speaking, speaking has no manner, for nothing moves in my country
except the policeman’s finger on the trigger, provoking my fingers into a protest poem.
In this poem, there is no tapestry of grief I will unweave,
no bloodstains I will unpaint.
Now, this is how we unbury hatred;
hunting love when it as soft as a sparrow learning the music of flight,
burning its wings till it becomes a boy waking up to the taste of burnt boys in his throat.
This is why the sun wrests the earth from the night’s grip every morning,
each usurp, a bid for absolution.
I used to shape my heart into a canopy of trees,
waiting on the sun to rain like a confetti of Pentecost flames & burn the emptiness in me.
Now, I walk on water—
my steps, a love song to the river where lost boys are turtles hiding in their shells as they touch themselves in the dark and exhale bubbles of hallelujah.
Every river is a healer for the believer. I mistake my drowning as the river’s response to my love song.
Nnamdi Ndiolo’s work explores the body as a muse for grief, language, memory, music, and sexuality and is featured or is forthcoming in The Lumiere Review, the Kalahari Review, Konya Shamsrumi, Chestnut Review, Frontier Poetry, and others. He tweets at @mirrorofbryan and grams at @firelord_bryan.
