Mark DeCarteret

Song of Trees

Before I was born, my mother swallowed a lanternfly. It pulsed in her throat for months, its wings fluttering each time a man passed. When I arrived, I was already a window. The night I was taken, the moon sat in a bowl of palm oil. Someone must’ve placed it there. Even the dogs turned their heads. My thigh was soft as boiled yam. He pressed into it like someone testing for rot. Outside, a mango dropped. Then another. Then another. Fruitfall has a rhythm. So does violation. I returned to the river three moons later. My mouth full of cassava. My body full of nothing, which is to say, everything I didn’t ask for. The river did not remember me. Fishes don’t blink. They saw the red thread floating from between my legs and mistook it for bait. The sun was inside me, hot enough to crack clay open to see what it’s hiding. A fig tree touched my shoulder. Beneath it, I found a girl’s  clothes wrapped around a tortoise shell. I wore them. It felt like forgiveness wearing another girl’s wound. At night the grasses undressed me slowly. Their tongues green and rough, like curious uncles. What the earth demanded from me was not a mother or a grave. But something tasting. There are no straight lines in a body remade by ruin. All you find there are circles:
    the mouth &
     the bruise &
      the moon pulled low.

They say spirits walk backwards. I believed them when the snail trailed across my navel and spelled his name. The ants lifted my nipple like a relic. Even the flowers had eyes. I wept.
My spine curled like a millipede in heat. I gave the moon my wrists. She tied them with sap
and called it daughterhood. That night, something grew inside me. A second mouth whispering to boys in the market: Touch her. And something will answer. The garden speaks in green lung and thorn. I press my lips to the soil, to hear the root moan. The yam hums under earth, remembering the hands that yanked it out prematurely. I, too, was unripe. Still, something fed on me. Some mornings, I sweat yam broth. Other days, hornets sleep beneath my arms. I walk with my face backwards. So I can see what keeps chasing me. So I can kiss the ghosts before they touch my skin. If healing comes, it must arrive barefoot. It must press itself against me like a lover who knows better than to ask what I survived. I am not whole. But the tree I once lived in has started blooming mouths. They sing.

Nwodo Divine is a writer and editor based in Nigeria. His poems have appeared on poetry column, Bacopa Literary Review, Heavy Feather Review, and elsewhere.