I am

I am a Nigerian . I am not a virus .

I am a black person . I am not a criminal .

I am a woman . I am not an object .

Strong

Strong
Redefined by the strength in my tears
Every drop left a crack in the cement
Where It traveled and found a seed
The rebirth
Oxygen from my hard breathing
As I wept out loud between each crowd of tears
Strength in my tears that helped heal me today
So I could move on tomorrow
See they lied to me when they said
Hold it all in
And it'll all go away
Be a big girl
Be strong
But I want so badly to let it all out
So it can never come back my way

The times I woke up and said
I am okay
Made all the difference in that day

Whole

I so badly want you to be human
I so badly want you to feel
Your Expressions of authenticity
The hurt
The agony
But I want you so badly to resist
Resist the notion of being broken
Because you are whole
A whole woman that feels
Pain , misery , hurt
But never broken .
Never in pieces
Because you are whole
Through life's battles you are whole

Intergenerational Disconnect

Nnem

Biko, nyem mmiri

She nods

Rushes to the kitchen to get mommy a glass of water.

That she understood

Nwam ahurumginanya

My baby, I love you.

Ezigbo Nwanyi

Good girl

So she was called often when she greeted her elder.

She knew to do that.

Some things she didn’t understand but she knew she had to.

A broken people. A broken culture.

Making whats left into something of substance.

Her middle name Christina.

She recently disowned it.

She wanted to understand her culture. Learn her history.

Put the missing pieces together.

Gini ki choro?

What do you want?

I want so badly to connect with my identity. To make sense of this world through the lenses of my ancestors.

Broken English.

Remnants of a people who tried desperately to resist the deterioration of their history.

Books written by the White man.

She struggles with her native tongue.

She struggles to find authenticity in today’s traditional practices.

Olunne.

The youngest child. Ever so anxious and curious to learn.

Ever so rebellious. She refuses to turn and hear her past name

That is, Christina.

In a country of forced assimilation to tries so hard to connect.

Azu

Fish. She knows this because she loves to cook.

The smell of dry fish seeps through her bedroom drawers into the seems of her clothes.

She wants to know . She wants to understand. She wants to be inspired.

For she knows her people did not give up their history and culture so easily.

She knows they fought. The melanin that fights off the radar of the sun.

Had to be somewhere in the eyes . Inside the soul of her people.

A spiritual group of people. In nature they found themselves.

Tata.

Today.

Another word she knew. She learned so in her Igbo class as a child.

But the yearning for oneself travels to Echi.

Tomorrow.

O gini?

Whats wrong? Mommy used to ask.

A communal caring group of people.

Poisoned with corruption and strife.

She wants to know how we got here. So she searches everyday.

Generations of lost people. She feels so distant.

But she knows we try.

Our song and our dance tell no lies.

I di mma.

It is well.

Aham Bu

Chisara

Okwu

God Answers Prayers

In a name. Is a story. Is a people. Is a culture.

They took our land and our resources

But they did not take my name.

Beautiful Resistance of a Name.

Out of her womb came a name.

In a name. Is a story. Is a people. Is an experience.

My head covered in plasma was a prayer answered of Life.

Nnennaya

My Dads’s Mother.

Read from Right to Left.

So many N’s you better remember it.

For it does not simply mean grandmother.

It means I am my grandmother.

Through me She lives.

With me . We remember.

Her life lives on. Generation after Generation

Oh. The Beautiful Resistance of a Name.

The intricacies of a renowned social order.

Where names tell stories.

Where names give purpose.

Where names give people value.

A child is priceless.

For a child carries the traditions and cultures of the family.

The blood and tears of the family.

The heartache. Like my ancestors did.

Through the struggle. Through the destruction of one’s idenity and culture.

A name remained.

A name gave hope.

I am the future. A prayer answered by Chi.

The Clasp

And there it was.

My hand in yours.

But before that I noticed something.

I noticed that you had five squiggly lines that looked just like mine.

But mine all turned to the right of my palm. Towards my thumb.

And at that point I wondered what it meant.

Was it that we had come on two different but strikingly similar paths?

Did those paths meet when you clasped your hands into mine?

At that moment I wondered if soul mates were real

If there was a God and if she purposefully and intelligently made me for you.

The way my hand met yours.

Science could not explain the levels of radiation that filled my heart.

How it sunk and so many breaths were lost.

Electromagnetic spectrum.

Waves of energy. I was literally shocked.

A literal pause in time.

Figuratively in heaven.

A match made.

Or that’s how the allegory goes.

My thumb met your finger

Like the strongest creases on the human hand.

And there it was .

The simplicity of a clasp.

I needed to get a grip.

And suddenly my heart began to thump. I became unlocked. Open. Viable.

When joined my hand in yours. I literally stopped.

I could not.

The relaxing chill after an intense orgasm.

The resharpening and realignment of both my brain and vision.

And there you were. Your hand in mine.

I felt.

Something bigger than us. Driving me to you.

Like the lines on my hand that perfectly matched up with yours.

Lets go

I want to go away with you

I know it sounds cliché

But cliché gives me hope

It helps me to dream

Because I know that somewhere underneath all this skin

These organs

These bones

There is hope.

Hope that lives in the soul

I know it sounds cliché

But when I met you I connected to your soul

I felt this Earth was too harsh to cold

For our love to grow

So at that pointed I wanted to go

I wanted to go somewhere far away

So that our love could grow

So I could feel the vibrations of your soul in the depths of my heart

Perhaps Mars with its burning fires

Third degree burns no wonder Im in so deep

So raw . This love

The momentum of Venus

She spins the opposite way of Earth

Because although this is cliché

And everyone must say

Their love is authentic and real and out of this world

Its opposite of everyone elses

I don’t blame them.

Because the eeriness I feel with you is not cordial.

It is not friendly

The strangeness of our connection doesn’t make me comfortable

It makes me wonder. It makes me think . It makes be question

How all this time I had not known something so vicious.

Something so pure.

How I had gone all this time and not understood

Until I met you.

This ongoing shock.

It excites me. It amazes me. It energizes me.

Like that vibration from your soul to the depth of my heart.

And now I want to go.

Far away with you.

And I just hope you come.

I hope everything I feel about you is everything you feel about me.

Perhaps more.