(for Aleppo)
Ogodo paints dead bodies,
they are now many in his gallery:
he has used lungs of fireflies, and
the vulture whose bald skull had been
bored into by dead flesh moths,
he leaves a large expanse on his canvas
to accommodate the network of brain wires that
was left, gushed out, after the work on the granite,
he holds it up and
nods, shedding tears as he always does, to cure
seizure pains in his body – he unhooks the
over-one-hundred-years old tortoise left in
his brain since the last Easter, since
the zoo was given to vegetarians;
the elderly tortoise has left strings
of tears on her cheeks, for him to paint;
again, he has gathered all the used bullets in Aleppo
and untagged the names on them,
the names are highly flammable that
they catch fire from his brush,
he turns over the ashes from the
burnt names, and uses it to fine-brush the tears
which the tortoise had shed in his mind.
The tortoise, the vulture and the fireflies have
gathered into one body to name him.
The scrap collector pays for his
pain-relievers and his other sins;
he overdoses, to
vaccinate the seizures: sets out a long day to
paint from all the mass burials he has attended.
Ejiofor Ugwu is the author of the chapbook, The Book of God (APBF/Akashic, 2017). His poetry and short fiction have been published in Guernica, African American Review, Drumtide Magazine, The New Black Magazine, ELSEWHERE Lit, Cordite Poetry Review, Sentinel Nigeria, The Kalahari Review, and The Muse, a journal of creative and critical writing at the University of Nigeria. He is an MFA student of poetry in the Creative Writing program at Syracuse University.