The Marvels of Little Extents
Our god is awake but chose to ignore us as a cloud
emptying glass into a child’s mouth there were
days he gifted us the sky as a culture plate we made
streaks on it & hoped a colony of stars would
grow out of it we’ve spent our young arms
praying for this manna the sky has risen
too far from us I reproach my country for this
I reproach myself who’s searching science out of
every measure this could be a misgiving
but I do not wear myself opalescence to end up in a
blurry frosted slide how many more hand
should we spend to gather enough of our ruins?
such could be a decent mutiny almost merciful
the glory closing upon us like the walls of Jericho
you are damned the moment you can only be blue-fleshed
through the gravy mouth of an aged motherland & now
that the pistol is cocked before you do you still confess
allegiance to the place eating you as a leftover from a
half-dug grave? sometimes stardust comes too early
to begin with or too late to have happened & we keep
forgetting that a country owes us the much we owe death
nothing trips me anymore not even my mouth that now grows
a carpet of tongues but I can say I’m happy for a slip into
manhood happy for the little hike I’m happy that this day
spares me I’m not sure what tomorrow will offer but I’m
always glad for the little extent
The Harvest of Nightmares
The night buzzes with bones, the lips of the wind peeling into redness — the contours, curling up to cover the heaviness of the knife peeling into redness. A sigh scales a poem to history, the shots of rain, almost tearing our rooftops. The figments of bad economics, luring the nation to limbo. Each moment opens with sprinting, always the same, blood-red rush — sprinting from something tearing up the centre. History draws a sword, a falcon morphs into a knife ripping the laws apart, the tune escapes the piper and crashes upon us, its pitch, chasing all of us like a wolf. The wind of anarchy whirls of dirge, an illegitimacy caked with leavened crimes, unfurling like a dry field across a lake of inferno, fiery and deep, it spares no one.
There are no myths to worship, no legend to mirror our cracks — our shadows, mere silhouettes running into the night’s pockets for refuge. In the day’s breath, a wake of wounds, and ruins raining through our ceilings, the ballot saves no longer, the law too pricey for the needy, the chaos too bony to level the surface. I’m sorry, no one is idle enough to bear our cross, no father is naive anymore to gift us his son for a second coming. We asphalt our pains to hush as a way to nickname our losses & bar it from coming off as triggers.
There’s so much blade
on the fist of a country—
so many scissors on the
hands of blooming laws:
How many times will I start
with furious naked wires
on my teeth? An egalitarian
cosmos on my animal heart?
There’s a saintless way of
excavation: a premonition
of the past taking tolls
on the future & outlawing
my rocket from batching
into the space with a lamp
only to end up discovering
that god is a vacuum feasting
on our echoes. I practice this
to understand the thing pulling
us under laws. What grows a
rock in the ignorance of magma?
What walks on water in the oblivion
of weight? If I had earned the odds to
save the dinosaurs from rebellious
asteroids—if I had such grace of
pull in this world, don’t you think
I would make our space selfless &
beautiful before a loyal cause
blessing our websites with cookies?
Nwuguru Chidiebere Sullivan
Nwuguru Chidiebere Sullivan (he/him/his) is a speculative writer of Izzi, Abakaliki ancestry; a finalist for both the Rhysling and Ignyte Award, a nominee for the Forward Prize, Pushcart Prize, and Best of The Net Award; a data science/analyst techie and a licensed Medical Laboratory Scientist. He was the winner of the 2024 Rhonda Gail Williford Award for Poetry, and the 2021 Write About Now’s Cookout Literary Prize. He has works at Strange Horizons, FIYAH Lit Mag, Uncanny Mag, Nightmare Mag, Augur Mag, Arc Poetry Mag, Filednotes Journal, Sand Journal, Kernel Magazine, Mizna, and elsewhere. He tweets @wordpottersul1.
