the hero's landing who is he? the boy who bought his way to a smile? he fought back each night his sister denied him a story. the cold that rattled his bones haunted by his mother's intent iterations. you're a son I'm not pleased with. you're a thickheaded fool. he struck a mean pose confronting the terrors with his loudness. I'm making it through the thick darkness I grew into. I'm avenging my childhood. he's replying his father's accursed accusations. I'm not proud to be your father. you're no good my boy. his younger sister rumbles before him. a persistent element glazed between her feminine spirit to audacity and the genuflecting urge to reflect on her hero's landing. how to be a better sister so that my brother does not scold me without provocation. cat lunch my cat thinks her meal awaits her. she forgets the flies, the ants, the crickets, the lizards, the mice, the squirrels, the birds. she dreamily watches the birds and they sit taciturn without a care on power lines watching her too. she always loses them, the squirrels too. the mice she has caught on more than one occasion, doing whatever she pleases with their anatomy. the lizards too. the crickets make for good protein i hear and she is neither behind on that info, nor lagging on its benefits. the ants she doesn't dignify with as much as a gaze when they're all over her lunch and the flies? they forget her, so she eats them. no commonplace for Woman the men in our house have to eat of the offerings to connect to the spirits, but We don't. We sit because they offer us chairs, they suffer not our backs to split while they eat the choicest of parts, the thick thighs of the chicken messengers, their hearts and gizzards but in eating they're becoming. We don't need to eat to become We already are divinity though that is not what they say, no. they say, you're women. only men are allowed in the inner sanctuary but your sanctuary is made of a roof without luxuriating locks and bricks of no flesh! We hold the holiest of holy sanctuaries in case you haven't noticed. this here is a house that breeds magic. there's no commonplace for a name that speaks god and erects man. night out with the gods i was out with the gods the other night. the sky offered the room a chandelier and in her gasp, she spilled bloody Mary on her lover's palette. the sun went indoors afterwards and those beyond the sun's circle rowed to sleep. it was left to us to keep the night rustling. the moon was on a ruse. and i sipped slowly from starlight in the air of a muse. to bleed a throat dry a monster that doesn't know it's a monster father's accusations pervade the thin air with spikes that latch onto my throat. i have learned to not speak back silence soo much it drowned him in a foreboding that his daughter had grown to be a ghost. so i cascade back some flesh and this time, nail myself to his directions. in bleeding, i might have room to paint myself a bolder sky on the days i don't see one.
About the Author:
Adaobi Chiemelụ is of Igbo-Nigerian descent. She writes and performs live music and poetry inspiring movement. She is a 2023 fellow of the Idembeka Creative Writing workshop and is the author of _Purple Heart_, a poetry chapbook. Her poems appear in the Muse journal, Arts Lounge, the Peace Exhibit, and elsewhere. You can find her @adaolilies on IG, Twitter, and YouTube.
Isele Magazine 