I lied to you about everything.
About the children, the goldfish, about
oleanders blossoming in the sun.
Half a truth is also a lie. Do you remember
the story from my childhood,
how I’d said the word fireworks. How
beautiful you said my life must’ve
been, something neat & quiet, like Sudan
before the bombs. When I said fireworks,
I meant I grew up afraid of the sky. I meant once,
during class, we heard gunshots
in the schoolyard & our teacher asked us
to hide. To shut our eyes. To imagine
it was just fireworks. I lied to you about every
thing. Even the goldfish. Was it Darwin
or Rothenberg that linked beauty to survival?
O, how silly I was to believe it applied
to me. Like goldfishes: Beautiful beyond sushi,
beyond hook net & butcher knives,
beautiful enough they are preserved for nothing else.
What is happening, we all kept asking
as we emerged from under our desks. We were
so young we knew nothing about harm.
So I lied to you because I was afraid of this memory,
because I was once beautiful & yet
they came, blood hungry, shooting, shooting.
Chiwenite Onyekwelu is a Nigerian poet. His poems live in Hudson Review, Cincinnati Review, Adroit Journal, Chestnut Review, and elsewhere. He won the 2024 Idumaese Alao Prize for Literature. He is also the winner of 2023 Hudson Review Frederick Morgan Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the Alpine Fellowship Prize. Chiwenite holds a Bachelor of Pharmacy (B.Pharm) from Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Nigeria. He’s on Twitter as @Chiwenite_O
Photo by Sebastian Unrau on Unsplash