by Nwuguru Chidiebere Sullivan
I'm throwing fragile hands into a cloud reeking
of teeth, searching for an unleavened joy out of it.
Here lies the chassis of what I prayed for,
cobwebbed into dusty words, left unchecked
as a crime committed upon us by a god. The
loss of joy is in the quest of it. I swear, I'm
owning this moment with the smoothest
laughter parting from my cracked lips.
My blood is full of poisons that I've survived,
& I've dug up enough happiness from the
dungeons of my plights, so much of it
immunes me to adversity, makes me numb
to the claws pricking my skin in search of useful
magmas. So many stories have been told of how
my black is an ore, of how the Atlantic
points at us to claim its prey— those it
gulped for fun. I'm the garden of laughter,
of things that could not earn death, I had to
live the rest of it, making libraries out of
pleasure from boredom— every section,
a content of surrealism, so sublime it
almost passed as an isotope of reality.
At some point, I forfeit waking just to have
enough of it. At all points, the effervescence
feels loveable; branding burns into tattoos
& I begin to feel like a diamond, as though
every pressure tames me to a forest of gold.
As though I'm a zombie eating joy out of ruins.
NWUGURU CHIDIEBERE SULLIVAN (he/him/his) is a keen writer of Izzi, Abakaliki ancestry; a Medical Laboratory Science student whose works 101 have been nominated for Forward Prize, Pushcart Prize, and Best of The Net Award. He was the winner of 2021, WAN–Cookout Journal Poetry Prize. He tweets @wordpottersull1 from his dimly lit room.
What Looks Like Joy Is A Zombie Eating Life Out Of Ruins can be found in Augur Magazine Issue 5.1.
