After years of being harmed by poaching, African elephants are evolving
without tusks.
Perhaps, that is what living is.
The loss we inflict on our being to survive a little longer.
If I alter my body to fit in the world, does that make me more or less
deserving of it?
My ambiguous desires, panicked ambitions, unassuming joy.
How much life are we allowed to make for ourselves in the face of what’s
been given?
The truth is none of us is anything without who we think we are.
So what if I made more of myself – erected a home out of both suit and
suitcase.
What is more real: the body or what it houses?
Is the elephant the tusks or the belief that it is who we say it is?
The act of naming can be a way of saying something is made up
Knowing this, I am not asking you to make room for me here.
If I say I am, and they scream You are not, I become more I than I ever was.
Maybe who we are is not nearly as important as the task of remaining.
Of bearing witness to our own history.
Maybe gender is just the same story retold differently.
Maybe the lesson is to let nature off the hook.
I want to insist that we can survive anything, even biology, even language.
That someday, it would be impossible to believe we were anything else.
Like the elephants welcoming each tuskless newborn with a rumbled prayer.
Someone asks, what who are you and our future rises to meet them, unharmed
by the syntax of the past.
Precious Arinze is a Nigerian poet, essayist, and author of the chapbook, The Hope of Floating Has Carried Us So Far, selected by Chris Abani and Kwame Dawes for the New-Generation African Poets Series (African Poetry Book Fund, 2021) and the Spanish Language Anthology of Poetry, Tres Preguntas: Poetas Jóvenes De Nigeria, published by the National Autonomous University of Mexico. Their works have appeared in Brittle Paper, Lolwe, Agbowo, ANMLY, The Republic Journal, Boston Review, Electric Literature, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Exposition Review, and Berlin Quarterly, among others.