Heat Period

The raised hindquarters
despite her four-legged posture.
 
For a week, the cat
showed the ghoul
 
of pleasure only
it was enmeshed
 
in her skeleton;
the cold grip,
 
the thrilling shock,
in her tiny frame,
 
flowered.
Puzzled,
 
she averts the margins,
portraying twists,
 
in the dark house,
at every moment, it stirred
 
up the coals.
"Why does she swivel
 
on the floor?" My mother asked,
crouching to knee-length height
 
to brush the fur.
In a bosque of greens,
 
the stretch she nurtures.
In the absence of that field,
 
in-between knowledge
and not knowing,
 
I mean, she asks, keen-duplicative,
"Do you say she needs a man?"
 
To know the language of one...
a pupil of this language--
 
of inquisition.

Biographical Dissonance

​Despite the age
of economic anxiety,
 
he prised the mint leaves
off the stem and did not bother
 
with the sap, never did clean
 
the sundry of things:
debts, one lofty lady after the next,
 
but stayed at the end
of a tryst; the sky
 
like a grey sky
where he stayed still.
 
Each night the smell
of Guinness Stout steams the air.
 
Half-possessed by wits,
of the masculine actions
 
deadened by modern oppositions,
he spoke. To abhor femaleness,
 
deprived of empathy, I pick
shamefully. Flashbacks
 
of his incipient violence
aimed at the women.
 
The first fist angled at my mother
becomes a perennial disability
 
once talked, delved into a weak stoat.

Onyedikachi Chinedu is a Nigerian poet. They have poems published in FU Review and elsewhere.