My Sister Spent Thirty Years Peeling an Orange
My mother said she did it in five minutes,
the time it took her to sing Our Father;
but she was a mother; all things came easy to her,
like peeling off the eyelids above her eyelashes,
like weaving handkerchiefs from her shut eyes,
like filling the sky with her tears to cause rainfall,
or peeling off the old, scaly skin above her navel;
or when she returned from the farm covered in mud,
she went into a pond at the back of our compound
and dipped herself seven times.
There was no time to cast away the old, dirty clothes,
because the miracle could not wait.
She re-emerged white as chalk,
pure and ethereal as Egyptian silk.
The other day, my sister stood before a wall mirror,
pulled on her hair, her face a broken moon,
layers and layers of eyelashes fluttering in the sky,
her hands poked into her head like pitchforks;
she almost took her scalp off,
the grey matter clinging to her fingernails,
like cakes of dried paint or glue.
Sometimes I see her body in a diaspora of colours,
from white to pink; black to yellow,
her lips like uli, her nose jutting out like spear grass;
she wears her skin like a split sky,
each layer fuming with the thunder of the time,
and I watch her with pathos as she peels off these masks,
when at thirty, my mother told her to go home.
If she were peeling an orange with fingers
longer than the pitchforks of the gothic era
which performed miracles beyond the grasp of time,
then she spent eternity staring at the mirror.
My mother whispered to us like the wind
when my sister turned her eyes and ears away,
that she would need over thirty years to end
the soft peeling of a yellow orange fruit.
Then her baby must have grown up to be a man
and would take over from where her mother stopped.
No more groping in the dark to discover her
when she is no longer there where we left her
and no more inking our sweat on the shadows
hoping to find the trust to heap on her head.
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Jonathan Chibuike Ukah is a Pushcart-nominated poet from the United Kingdom. His poems have been featured in Atticus Review, The Journal of Undiscovered Poets, Propel Magazine, The Pierian, The Silk Road, and elsewhere. He won the Alexander Pope Poetry Award in 2023 and was a Second Runner-up at the Kingsman Quarterly Poetry Slam in 2024.
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Stone Poetry Quarterly 