Mark DeCarteret

museum of fattened silence

a boy scrapes cold akara from a rusted plate
          that remembers its hunger.
 his sister learns to sew with fishbones.

father’s voice arrives late,
 in the form of mildew spreading across
 a photograph. someone was there.
 someone was unbuttoning the sky.

—i mean, he tried to 
turn a grenade into a wedding ring.

in the next room, an oil lamp performs
 its slow, wet translation into smoke.
 even the flame forgets its mother.

sometimes, the house swells.
 plaster peels like dry fish skin.
 we call this the remembering.

under the floorboards:
 a spoon made of spine,
 half a rosary, a tooth
 still whistling the anthem backward.

at night, when we piss,
 we piss toward Enugu.
 no one tells us why.

grandmother once sewed
 a prayer so tight into her wrapper
 she bled forgiveness for a week.

—what is a war
 but the part of your body
 you’re forced to eat last?

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.