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Call 911, your country is on fire
to tweet my country
to me, a bird stood at
ease on the jaw of my
w i n d o w. in your country,
it began, a g i r l has been
missing for so long, her name
has been forgotten. And there’s
a little boy who believes so strongly that
his mother is after his own life. In your country
men have grown so fat eating
h u n g e r, and women __
the bird paused a bit to break off a blue fin
are the most-
preferred sacrifice of the gods
& to call your president to order,
is to insert four fingers into
your eyes. N i g e r i a will break you.
the bird turned to take its
leave, and the crackle in the sky
like an ominous soundtrack interloped
and as the bird Swung free it tweeted; call 911,
your country is on f i r e.
About the Author
Flourish Joshua is a NaiWA poetry scholar and second runner-up of the 7th Ngozi Agbo Prize for Essay. He has been published/forthcoming on Brittle Paper, Sledgehammer Lit, Pidgeon Hole, Up the Staircase Quarterly, Indianapolis Review, East French Press, Praxis Magazine, Rigorous, and elsewhere. He is Managing Editor at Naija Readers’ Buffet, reader at Frontier Poetry Journal and Interview Editor at Eremite Poetry. Instagram and Twitter: @fjspeaks.
Email: joshuaspoetrybank@gmail.com
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