“Binary” by Ugonna-Ora Owoh


the world left an oak in the belly of my first body
i left too soon i was spine out of summer inside
another man’s sweat-slick throat forgive me
if i was binary i dipped my flesh into two
separate fragments in my birth country i was the
dusk creeping on walls hoping to find the
handprint of safety siren bursting the street
like twisting laughter cancering fear into
me thinking of the needy body drawing
so close to god bone compression my
bedazzled foe i was smart and stupid and
the dusk fed me its anger the way my body was
cement and concrete i could have died of blood
pressure brown skin turned into yellow
surrender the color of my blood i drank a glass of my body’s betrayal
the body i came to inhabit is too ugly too strange
too violent houses mirror as disaster
speaks too much paradise and i’m afraid
that what will kill me is the lies as
violent as my new name you can dine
with me death is giving me too many
chances
Ugonna-Ora Owoh is a Nigerian poet, writer and model. He is a 2019 Editor choice winner of the Stephen A. Dibaise poetry prize and has been nominated for the 2018 Young Romantics prize and 2019 Erbacce prize. His works has appeared in The Southampton Review, The Malahat Review, The Fat Crab Magazine, Matador Review, Strange Horizon, Frontier Poetry and elsewhere. He is a reader at Helen literary Magazine and The Malahat Review. Find him at Ugonnaoraowoh@instagram
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