soonest nathaniel
My lover’s body is a country
where condoms break and sentences begin to lose their periods.
She says the sentences of her life keep missing their periods
because a lecher suckled at her nipples before she grew breast.
My lover’s body is a city
where women weave baskets.
For grass they use boy’s pubic hairs and for rush, the thicket of their eyelashes.
The women twine into wicker baskets men’s beards and moustaches
and store in their wombs, beer, grains and the skull of decapitated dreams.
My lover’s body is a market
where a lost son is looking for his mother.
He is heading back to get on the road towards the sea,
the same road that swallowed his father; he is trailing his shadows;
he is following a strange god to a familiar place called home.
My lover’s body is a labyrinth
where the victims of chromatography hide
in their failed attempt to escape the burden of interpretation.
They know nothing of sunlight; their chlorophylls have been extracted,
they can no longer carryout the photosynthesis of their existence.
My lover’s body is a temple,
not like the Kakum of Uruk where myriads of idle hands pray to a drunk god,
seeking to rouse a slumberous yard into a rhumba of rattling demons.
In her body temple, the children of chaotic situations seek a distinct heaven,
away from the scourge of racial purity.
See them trying in futility to grapple, the language of rejection.
***
Soonest Nathaniel is a Poet and spoken word artist. He is the author of “Teaching My Father How To Impregnate Women,” selected as winner of the 2017 RL Poetry Award. He was poet Laureate for 2014 Korea Nigeria Poetry Festival. His poems appear or are forthcoming in Rattle, Silver Blade, The Pedestal Magazine, FIYAH, Silver Blade Poetry, Northridge Review, Praxis Mag, Raven Chronicles, Wiki Column, Saraba, Loudthotz, Northridge Review, Reverbnation, Elsewhere, Scintilla, Erbacce UK, Kalahari Review, Sentinel Nigeria, and Many more.