My Mother Walks Me
through a dream where a ballroom is capital city. Here is where I do not conceal the honesty
of my dance steps. Where each trip is an only misjudged move. Where each fall is a door to
a harvest of sympathy. Here, my mother dusts off the silt of inaction. She shoots towards
the horizon of a dawn far apart from the cemetery of bones. This dream is a garden & each wish a supple fruit that is obtainable. It is here I climb the tower of her voice, wade into
the trill of her pronunciations. I gather with ease the moonlight of our smiles, her audacity
of affection, my elongation of awe.
Where I Need to Be
I crawl out of my room to climbthe roof to watch
the moon paint the sky & the rest
of us a great white.
What’s mine is this year of loneliness, this season
where only the comings
& leavings of shadows feature.
Away from the stench
of rotting friendships, the limbs
of my soul flourish with
a leap into the fields of air.
I muster a troop of confidence
to carve out a brook
of affection for my company
To be the means of a shelter.
God & I bump shoulders, return
each other’s greeting & make room
for the wind in our conversation.
The Tenor of a Familiar Ache
The zinc of the roof keepscomplaining about the rain’s thump.
O, a thunderstorm veils
the manner in which I cry.
I have always declared to commit
this vessel of breath towards
the activity of survival, to rest
in the ribcage of a Christian heaven.
In the parlor of a dream, all that
is fitted with lungs suffer the blight
of gloom. Every hand, hoof, paw
& gill that is seen are exposed
to sadness which is no more
than a discounted rate of suffering.
What dulls their hearts curls
into mine & clogs it up.
Light shoots in several directions
save for this district of murk.
The wind is a murmur of hostility,
lightning a glimpse of what will end me.
Workday at a Construction Site
Lungfuls of dust, the wind swingingacres of cement about—
Fed sand the texture of a seashore,
the mixer grunts
& masticates the rigor of stone.
Sunlight thrashes
down a country of hair whitened
by digging—
What’s relevant is a streak of labor,
the venture in lifting weights
& dressing a structure with
an oath of completion.
Michael Akuchie @Michael_Akuchie is a poet of Igbo-Esan descent. Wreck, a chapbook manuscript (Winter 2020, The Hellebore Press) was selected by José Olivarez to win The 2019-2020 Hellebore Poetry Scholarship Award. Winner of the 2020 Roadrunner Prize for Poetry, he is a one-time nominee for Best of the Net and The Orison Anthology respectively. He tweets @Michael_Akuchie and reads submissions for Frontier Poetry.
Banner Art: Talking to the Moon, a digital artwork by Robert Frede Kenter
IceFloe Press 