Self-Portrait as Etioly
by I.S. Jones
I am a spell of six letters.
I have a name that begins and ends countries.
What could end a country begins a mother.
A girlchild then, she fetched water for home.
‘Home’ means what you love cannot return the same.
Nigeria, her first love: open by war.
War only understands thirst. Soldiers did too.
She saw them but couldn’t outrun their hands.
Hands that tore open her mouth, stomped out her face.
She mouths to me the word miracle.
Her lips resisting the dull pull of scarred flesh,
Go to Nigeria & I will bury my eldest daughter.
I have a name that begins and ends countries.
I am a spell of six letters.
I have a name that begins and ends countries.
What could end a country begins a mother.
A girlchild then, she fetched water for home.
‘Home’ means what you love cannot return the same.
Nigeria, her first love: open by war.
War only understands thirst. Soldiers did too.
She saw them but couldn’t outrun their hands.
Hands that tore open her mouth, stomped out her face.
She mouths to me the word miracle.
Her lips resisting the dull pull of scarred flesh,
Go to Nigeria & I will bury my eldest daughter.
I have a name that begins and ends countries.
I am a spell of six letters.
I.S. Jones is a queer American Nigerian poet and music journalist. She is a Graduate Fellow with The Watering Hole and holds fellowships from Callaloo, BOAAT Writer’s Retreat, and Brooklyn Poets. I. S. hosts a month-long workshop every April called The Singing Bullet. I.S. coedited The Young African Poets Anthology: The Fire That Is Dreamed Of (Agbowó, 2020) and served as the inaugural nonfiction guest editor for Lolwe. She is a Book Editor with Indolent Books, Editor at 20.35 Africa: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry, freelances for Complex, Earmilk, NBC News THINK, and elsewhere. Her works have appeared or are forthcoming in Guernica, Frontier Poetry, Washington Square Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Hobart Pulp, The Rumpus, The Offing, Shade Literary Arts, Blood Orange Review, Honey Literary and elsewhere. Her work was chosen by Khadijah Queen as a finalist for the 2020 Sublingua Prize for Poetry. She is an MFA candidate in Poetry at UW–Madison as well as the Inaugural 2019–2020 Kemper K. Knapp University Fellowship recipient. Her chapbook Spells Of My Name is forthcoming with Newfound in 2021. She splits her time between Southern California and New York.