Sewing My Brother Back to Life
and other poems by Akpa Arinzechukwu
poetry | 4 min read | TW: suicide, death
Sewing My Brother Back to Life
Three & a half inches into sewing all my sorrows together
my brother comes back to life.
Between two thread cuts, I begin to realise this might be
another story I have made up to keep myself from falling apart.
The needle stops picking a thread from the bobbin, just like that.
Our sun is covered in a badly tailored trench coat. Our sky is a field
of dead flowers. I am alone in my tailoring workshop of imagination.
All the cloths on the mannequins are three times oversized. My brother
extends his hand to me but what I do not understand is why grief has so much
to offer when it is barely an A-list Designer.
Is the weight of grief the colour of the soil in planting season? Is the strength
of a ghost tied to sadness, crickets marauding the nightscape in all black?
I set the stitch length of the sewing machine to gather, & sew a cloth no one
will ever wear in this life without falling apart.
My brother keeps coming back to life when no one is watching. There must be
something about our sky. All our stars are veiled.
How do I touch his face if I can’t see the grave he defeated? Once a year
the legend goes of a particular butterfly that broke everyone’s heart by flying
all year long without sucking at a pollen. Once a year the legend disputes itself,
if all the flowers were dead how’d a butterfly land without hurting its gears.
Once a year I sit alone in my brother’s oversized cloths thinking if I pedal the sewing
machine gently, slowly, time would stop for us, & my brother will have the love he craved.
Autumn
I hear in the night of terror
God reigns supreme. Autumn leaves
dropping silently unto each other. Each leaves
dropping as confused as the other. & you know
the thing about supplication is the silence with which
a thought must be communicated. God in his palms
carrying a boy, ridding persimmons off its own dirt, its wings,
till a boy is neatly shaven & naked in the world.
Born almost blind I am grateful to not catch Onan spilling his seed
on a bare earth, laden with all the bloodshed, military boots,
police guns poised like pubescent boys’ early morning erections.
Would I have done differently set loose before Tamar the night
after ruins? I would store every seed of the persimmon in a cup,
hidden in history, hoping historians will somehow forget, like they always do.
& should I blame a lover for being selfish, choosing discretely the things
they’d rather see? Given memory, a man would choose to remember
minutes before the erection, lovemaking. Not the bullets with different blocks
of names, counting & laying claims to bodies. If it is autumn & a boy is shaving
in a public toilet, that’s the image stuck in my head. I too approach memory
like a prayer, acknowledging the season, accepting that
a man is a man first, then a blunder discovered
long after the sentence is finished & forgotten.
Decay
In English, smell is a perception. If you can’t sniff it, it isn’t there.
No matter how it tornadoed last night, ridding earth of five hundred years
old dead bodies in its oeuvre, what isn’t there can’t be there. We hang
by our dead drinking late into the night, outstripping the night of its magnificence,
while also fleeing hangovers in our native land. Which is to say a stranger knows
only what they want. I am not a stranger in my body, so I know better. That a smell
in Igbo must be heard, it screams late into the night while all of our feet are in flight,
to that foreign land. Gently, then louder as God tosses all our asylum requests into
an eternal abyss, to start again, from the beginning, where it hurts most.
In the cold where my body is rotting, I want to be more than a man’s wet dreams –
not talked about in passing, in a pub for retired old dirty generals, but to be an antelope
like in my past life, discerning & in total withdrawal from my pains.
I am two things & one thing possible –
a genocide dislodged from the canon of a mad man,
a ghost stranded in the shadow of a puppeteer, a boy
strapped to the armchair of a lover whose hand is eternal
whenever it embraces the cheeks. This means I am always six feet away
from a bomb crater from exiting my own body & being surprised
a body could both be in pain & funny. Funny how the backhand of God
is the thing I see clearest when am not in flight but in my lover’s bed.
Wherever estranged ghosts are, I am the leader, shining brighter than the glitter
of a dictator’s gold teeth as he orders a massacre.
Piled up in a mass grave, the ghost that is not my brother asks whom I want to impress
with this stench. God, I say. A receipt to prove I believed, therefore I died.
Anniversary of His Suicide
The boy from miles away, looking for his father,
plays a broken flute, & every note he misses
reminds me of my brother – the backhand of suicide.
It is night which means the opposite of grief is more grief
& not the wrinkled face of a man not of this world anymore,
which means in naming my grief my brother still won’t unwind time
for any of us to be little children again without a bullet pointing fast at us,
or a time where we are all horny waiting for the arrival of rain.
It is easier to say all my dreams are valid than to admit all my dreams are valid.
Sometimes I’d like to imagine the moon is all there is to treasure in my night
but even the light at the end of the tunnel could be an invitation to more sorrows.
I am holding on to the hem of my brother’s shirt watching the boy play his flute
in a desolate city, towards the severed face of God, unaware of the destruction
brewing inside of me. It’s more like the sound the hourhand makes before
bombing a city out of existence. & if we are lucky we still might remember
the taste of flesh in sand as midday becomes the absent of life.
The boy holds high into the darkness a picture of his father, my brother,
shape-shifting between a young man & maggots in a frozen time zone.
Oh poem, take me too.
