Lab Work by Onyekachi Iloh

The Poetry Archive Now! WordView 2024 Entry

Poet’s Biography
Onyekachi Iloh is a writer, poet and visual artist exploring photography as a means of documentation and the re-examination of sight. He is a winner of the Oxford Brookes Poetry Competition and an Oxbelly Fellow. With his writing, he seeks to to document the mundanities of human existence. When he's not playing pretend-guitar, he reads poetry or mourns his country.

Poem Description / Inspiration
The poem explores disillusionment with one's country and how this disillusionment is engaged with and reacted to. Many across the world live feeling betrayed by the countries of their birth, and this sense of betrayal often leads to unwilling migration. This is the reality of many in the Global South, including Nigeria where I'm from. This poem examines this unwelcome hunger for another country; I wrote it after one such bout of hunger.

Poem Text
A posse of pilgrims once lost in the desert’s eye
lumbered around in circles looking for a familiar constellation.
Finding nothing but the biting sea of sand,
despair intimated them of the hounds’ flight into the sky’s great dark.
The huntsman was presumably mauled, and the bears, presumably shot—
blood shadowing their crawl into the lightless recesses of space and myth.
In the story no one dares tell, there is a host of us who hate
because that which we loved, did not love us back.
I belong to no flag but the nation of boundless waves and heedless winds—
in unison did the multitude of us lie about where the blade twists
or if the knife entered at all.
We walked streets named after despots,
pressed our thumbs into the evening’s oranges,
and swung our beloveds’ arms this way and that, singing of the body,
its technicoloured radiance when beheld through the lens of hunger.
Everyone, not just us, wants to be wanted and conquered
enough to dribble with honey;
nobody else, just us, is hunted and scourged with conquest.
I aim to be more specific in my supplications, Lord. I aim, I fail.
I pray: please draw the bullseye where my arrow needles the earth.
Twilight shards the wall into hexagonal cities sharp and precise,
as the sun streams through the window grille and the room becomes an empire of light.
Prayer calls the pious as a distant church bell eats another hour.
Cavafy lies face-down on the bed—
his spine, like mine, is halved with the hunger for another country.
I always admit the hunger but do I ever admit the love?
In getting the tongue to profess revulsion when the heart telegraphs attraction,
I became a mad scientist engrossed with the making of his personal heaven.
For singing jauntily and counting too often my ribs with the barbed tip of a spear,
I became intent on inventing a more palatable feeling towards the motherland.
The sun-sired cities vanish, the pilgrims grow fat on one another’s blood,
and I do not notice the table rotting beneath the test tubes,
the pipettes turning to dust in their racks,
or the vines vaulting up the walls
with the gentleness of a second language affecting speech.