We have no use of our suffering.
A kind of forgetting my father tells me is necessary.
I am looking at a photograph of home: my mother
with her neatly chiseled nose, my father with
bad legs eaten by a bomb during the Biafran war.
There is a radio, older than any of us children,
& the one true
survivor of the war. Sometimes I listen to my
mother & father talk in the bedroom; they must love
each other so much even in their muffled cries of
things they both have lost. What can they do if not
place hearts into each other’s chests?
From the picture, you can guess who first peels away
from the scenery. My mother, whose voice
chimes with heat & lead. Then my father, whose
cough and hisses escape back into his throat.
I turned to my mother’s nose, it was cracked
beyond recognition. I turned to my father’s bad legs,
there was something about his gait—
persistent & then dying again.
Prosper C. Ìféányí writes from Lagos, Nigeria. A finalist for the 2024 Greg Grummer Poetry Prize and the 2023 Gerald Kraak Anthology Prize, his works are featured or forthcoming in The Offing, Salt Hill Journal, Obsidian, ANMLY, Black Warrior Review, Denver Quarterly, New Delta Review, the Oxonian Review and elsewhere.