In the afternoon of April 2026, the sun suffers cataract
in Benue state. the world is not seeing, her eyeball full
of gunshots and people. Packing their properties running
through the street, their breath breaking out of the lung in
tornado voice. the blood of a little boy watering down the
earth, from his broken ankle where he learns what terror
means. A dog tail wagging down in the art of surrender to
the music of parting. the traveling of the body to the depth
across breathing— an extension too long to walk through
and return. women breasts drum on their chests; the music
of fear sounding non-stop. A jazz for those who learn living
backward. From the wall of violence where war grows out a
head, two villages drag what is not theirs. Everyone quoting
the past that the earth doesn’t know about. How can one own
what he did not create? Even the body of a man is not his own
to kill. What do you say about land? But my people say every
land they clear has their father names on it. Another brand
new pain. Another gun screams. This time it calls my name.
I don’t answer. Thousands of voices pass across my face in
total freedom of making their own miracle. With their legs,
beating the earth into the shock it cannot contain. Their hands
swinging in the wind of late prayers, when God is asleep. I do
not want to tell my brother run. Because running too is a safe
dying when guns have stripped off your eyes. We take out our fear,
with the sickle of faith. But the heart has perfected the skill of giving
us some more. That’s what it does most, to strike the body with
Nile of what will drown him. We stand in the outskirts of our mind
Looking for the shortest road to escape the tyranny of our time.
Philip Chijioke Abonyi is a Nigerian-based writer and poet. He was a finalist for the Stephen A. Diabase Poetry Prize in 2026, won the Brigitte Poirson Poetry Prize in 2022, and was shortlisted for the Eriata Oribhabor Poetry Prize in 2019. He is the author of the poetry chapbook Chemistry of a Dark Room and Radiation, published by Ghost City Press. His work has appeared in African Writer Magazine, Agape Review, Eve Magazine, Typehouse Magazine, Synchronized Chaos Magazine, Better Than Starbucks, and elsewhere.
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