transmutation

It goes on for miles. This scarred heaviness.

—Othuke Omukoro 

the news of the cancer finds the chibwabwa leaves on the kitchen stove.

a burning, it has been said, will keep you up long enough to regard your own diminishing. 

there is how we fold the stems here, and the breakage is less violent, instant 

and clean. and then there is the stringy fibre of the stalks, that we strip and strip until 

there is a tangibility to the fractures. there is more to how the cancer

arrives folding at your bones. there is a suddenness, that i catch momentarily—

and then every day after—through the hasty finishings of your sunroom camisole.

there is also how everything becomes a work towards easing—from how the doctor’s 

upper lip caricatures his smile when he says the chibwabwa leaves should keep your bones with us, to the new rehearsed manner that i carry you—facedown—from the corner couch to the 

bedroom chair, to your stifled giggles—that emerge tired from your abdomen—stringed firecrackers. and then there is your fleece blanket on the corner couch. that i fold and fold

until the contours start to feel incidental. the cancer arrives in the morning—a permanence—

alongside everything that should be good: the pink-purple ribbon the nurse hands me, a lesson in 

asepsis, bandaging, sanitising, nursing bone tissue, the fraying nozzle of the hand wash on the other side of the room that we take for granted. there are days i look past your fractures, and how they are here to stay, and then there are days i lift your cheekbone like an apology because

there is how you break/disintegrate and there is how i can not construct you back.

there is how the steam vent on the lid keeps the chibwabwa leaves from bubbling over. there is also the unspoken way this could end—with a diminishing. there is how everything that could end us is here. there is also how it is consuming us. there is how we stay spastic through the waiting and there is how the waiting becomes how we shrivel. there is also how one thing grows into another: how a cell grows into a scarring, how the evening wind grows cold inside your bones and how i know you can not take it. there is also the rehearsed manner in which i grow into the thing that heats you. there is how everything becomes a work towards staying alive. but the thing with staying, Adedayo Agarau writes, is that you will rot from the inside.

*chibwabwa - pumpkin leaves.

Nduta Waweru, Swan XVIII, writes her poems, short fiction, and essays from Nairobi, Kenya. She made the 2023 Kikwetu Flash Fiction Contest longlist, is a BOTN Nominee, an alumni of the Nairobi Writing Academy, and the Ubwali Masterclass of 2024. Reach her on Twitter and Instagram @_ndutawaweru.