This Country is a Bone
life has chosen to weather like
skyfall—
drupelets of a boy’s grief
washing up on a shallow grave;
his father, crushed by the crows
of a bullet. his mother,
a language tie-dyed in the
wake of blood. this
country balances
laughter on the thorns
of sadness. the only thing I’ve learned
of dreams is to nurse them
close to death— pluck
sorrow from the silence buried
in her bones. shrivel the
act of giving life offers
only a petal for thoughts.
I made ferries. I drowned.
I made bonfires. I burned.
I made warmth. I yearned.
this country mourns a sacred love,
spills chaos onto young light;
like good psalms
from a home ashed
in crimsons; nightmares stain
indigo on the eyes of soft joy
since she learned the
elysium of brevity. don’t you
think the body is a little merciful
with the bruises of
birdsong? too unkind to her own
shadows? the grave snaps
with fate— its weight
scattering through the fields
of breath. a boy creeps out of
the news limbless, the
same news that kissed sanity
off his father. this is the threshing
place— where we break
the pendulum by the beauty
of a ticking clock. ghetto-griefs for
every umbilical this country
owes a life, yet offers,
the apocalypse of an owl-light.
the day my vine heart died,
I knew I was only a wildfire
at the mouth of a diesel end.
Selfdom
I, broken inferno—
wilding the blue
sky of a loosened mind
once
soft-white
plateauing cathedral,
bearing a
Eucharist of blood
this sharpness
of ritual burns
toward expiation, but
the body kindles
a paper boot,
too dead to revive
my sister’s
religion is
thick with its fire,
cracking the spine
of God’s own volume
at midnight
a beautiful demon
breathes within
me, not
wooden enough
to burn
nor ash-blond
enough to die
only a sea
of prayer,
where I’m
submarine
& another, where
I become mami wata
my mother
has wept blessed salt,
& poured libations
of fire
into these
lukewarm veins
still, Lord, I’m trying,
but the street
of my flesh is a
traffic light into
my bones,
& I do not know
when the wind
will shine
a ‘halt’ to this wildfire
This Is Plutomaniac
I plait tongues with the lilies of a planet—
a gaunt escape from a loose mind,
that crackling lingo of lightning
h-a-t-c-h-i-n-g
a religion of a quivering god.
in this escape,
as in a light-year’s fevered wild,
I’m swathed in a dream-chemise—
shapeless verses of lilith
I’m swathed for a poem’s tethered spirit—
charred chalice, a bowl of shadows.
I drank blood, like anti-red—
like the credo
in gravity’s fractured dawn.
and I,
garbed in gravel— a heathen’s shawl.
I crawled to god,
again to that hollow god,
with the same void
craving strange wine—
with the
lining of a tuxedo’s shroud
stitched to the affinity of burning.
one Offertory to apocalypse
& another, for a sooted grief
where the poem
twists a broken demon. I murmur peace,
but the world still
gnaws her grotesque head.
so I crouch, canny, in this cesspool
of a co(s)mic maniac. what I can give
in the virgin chaos
of a blood-lit trauma?
I trade a lung to death’s cold brook—
and drowned it
in his tankard.
what ravenous shape am I,
O merciful solitude?
Specimen Of God’s Little Broken Things
for Pa Enyims
he clicked his teeth gently on an old farm bone—
where the field of his strength thins away,
his fate washed by chlorophyll,
shedding like Eden’s fall.
in the voice of love, even silence writes softly
in the ink of illness. Lord, he fought to hold
a golden dream in his hands.
like Gethsemane before the hill of Calvary,
we wore our prayers in blood
and found small sparks
of faith drifting between phone calls.
there’s a gentle door to breath until it filters
into death. my grandpa knew this illness
by its solemn
light and its entrance of life into life.
it lingered in the scent of the hospital sheets,
while we remembered the rivers
we still hoped to cross.
like the gospel of salve on Job’s
wounds—
we shared this
quiet ache beneath the stars.
the twilight spoke softly
over the wound of his body.
death kept on knocking, but we
held the knob of a martyr door—
they say God’s little
broken things are only small trials
between body and soul.
perhaps whatever lives in light
must first prepare
the body for its quiet heaven.
these are the biomes
of grief I’ve carried
in the splutters of farewell—
& the quiet flicker of our brave love,
would become the courage
I carried to write
you another poem.
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CP Nwankwo (he/him), SWAN IV, writes from Port Harcourt, Nigeria. He is a poet, historian, and editor. He received Honorary Mention for the Akachi Chukwuemeka Prize For Literature, ‘24/25, a finalist of the Lucky Jefferson Poetry and Prose Prize, 2024, Folurunsho Editor’s Poetry Prize, 2024, and was shortlisted for the Unserious Collective Fellowship Prize, 2024. His work is published/forthcoming in Palette Poetry, Mizna, Magma, Consequence Forum, Lucky Jefferson, Rough Cut, Muse UNN, Poetry ColumnNND, and elsewhere. He tweets @ CP Nwankwo.
✶
Red Danielson is a self-taught painter and a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His work has appeared in The Iowa Review, Haiku Journal, The First Person, Haiku Presence, Little Village Magazine, and is forthcoming in River Styx. He has worked as a concrete mason, a framer, a heavy equipment operator, and a grave digger. He lives in the Mississippi River Valley of Iowa.
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