A. Define loss in the following topics:
The pieces were pieces before everything broke.
There is a relativity to what culture you can call
yours/theirs alone.
To spread a disease, dip it in the Holy word, hide it
under a veil, exhume a twelve year old girl
collapsing back into her mother's eyes, tear
stained henna distilling love and innocence,
Asalam aleikum escaping somewhere out
of sight.
B. Identify the sources:
They carcass long before we bury their bodies.
A wedding ceremony for a girl to lie down
and decay in.
C. Imagine all other possible scenarios,
The girl takes one piece, carries her hymen to
the top of a hill in the desert.
If we send anger and outrage to join her there,
if the desert sun scorches them up,
if the sun lends a currency back to us,
if the currency exchanges for justice,
for religion,
if religion and justice are a bargain on hot coals,
if hot coals are childlike feet running across
a country to a God they can swallow,
say the country was enough to keep them safe,
prevent fears of outside coming in.
Think of a wall with water tirelessly seeping into it.
Think of the double sensation.
The hard softness.
Envision the eventual crumble, like a burdened womb
expelling life.
D. Answer the following questions:
If John the Baptist must come before Jesus,
what comes after marital rape and VVF?
What precedes the funeral of girlhood receding
faster than it arrives?
Why do men carve graveyards to bury their seeds
out of the bodies of little girls?
E. Craft a version of what the girl does next.
When the midwife hands the girl her daughter, she will
bathe her tears, run out and drown her in the river -
an understanding that water can be more forgiving
than men's hands, than poverty pillaged by faith,
than crime scenes that aren't yet, but soon will be
her body too.
F. Breathing exercises.
Inhale: the girl wants to be nothing but wind,
nothing but the thing trees bow to,
nothing but....
Her pieces stay pieces after everything breaks.
Say you fracture your humanity, the cracks lead away from
the desert, a piece of you gets trapped in....
Exhale.
Repeat until calm enough to maybe live with yourself.
Precious Arinze is a Nigerian Poet, freelance writer, and undergraduate, studying Law at the University of Benin, Nigeria. Her work has been published in Mojo journal and is forthcoming in various literary magazines.