in memory of all the Ndi-Igbo who were shipped into slavery
through the Arochukwu Long Juju Slave Route.
Beyond the dim, there is a six-foot gully,
so audacious & wide, it opens into the
oracle’s shrine. The voice of
Ibini Ukpabi, fresh-wet,
it saturates everyone’s
ear, it says, Kamalu,
the warrior god,
quelled
the
Gorgon for
our sake; for our sake,
he made sacrifices with his beloved
who fell short of his glory at the expense
of their sins. Now, in requiem to this, every homestead
shall sing of blood & blackwaters, which means:
the cost of a capital crime is a no-return
walk through the dark tunnel of
disappearance, where the
Gorgon now rules.
Outside, a wolf
prowls as if
enacting
a pact
with
the hooting
owl. The moonlight
scrapes through the dark presence,
a slingshot of pebbles hurl into Iyi-Eke
& echoes a man’s name; he has been found guilty of
the crime he was presumably framed for. Many went
this way. Each morning, we wake up to the
bloody torso of Iyi-Eke, the river so red, we
believe it to be the crimsoned evidence
of death from the ones who were cast
into the tunnel of disappearance
a night before. I did not know
that the way to heroism
is to lose your
way back
as
a villain in
the face of your
own kinsmen. Behind
the scene: a cast of light
reveals there was no night at all,
only the day opening into deep secrets.
A peep further, unfurls how the tunnel of disappearance
opens into the European Beach through the outlets of Iyi-Eke,
the thighs of the river, reddened with a bull’s blood;
something we swore was evidence of our quelled
kin. I never knew that the way to honour
Kamalu is to toss one’s kin into a
windowless façade of a pinhole;
something we were so sure
to be the way the gods
clipped off red-oiled
fingers from soiling
the rest of
our hands.
A
closer
surveillance
reveals how those
condemned to death in honour
of the pact with Kamalu are sold
behind doors for ten manillas & shipped from
the shores of Calabar into the transatlantic voyage.
Their names, chained, a thing with wings— lost birds,
singing of home — & then, become so cursed with foreign tongues as to never
sound like us; the villains who quelled their heads in a charade of pact with the gods.

Nwuguru Chidiebere Sullivan (he/him/his) is a speculative writer of Izzi, Abakaliki ancestry, a finalist for the 2023 Rhysling Award, a nominee for the Forward Prize, a data science techie and a medical laboratory scientist. He was the winner of the 2021 Write About Now’s Cookout Literary Prize. He has works at Strange Horizons, FIYAH, Uncanny Mag, Nightmare Mag, Augur Mag, Filednotes Journal, Antithesis Journal, Kernel Magazine, Mizna, and elsewhere. He tweets @wordpottersul1.
