Until now, loss & body is how to articulate grief. The law of articulation states that the story is used to find the unknown.
What is the story?
A boy is chiseled wrong in the face and his name is what happens when a preacher jumps from faith to faith. His lineage, a long history of people who transmute from fossil to a vast portrait of bodies sculpted without the notion of death.
The last time he dreamt, his father was the black man whose face was the least algorithm on the wall of grief. His mother, a citizen of a people whose prayers were the white flag signifying their non-death. But you see, with dreams, we learn the perception of the gods—and try to recreate them in our own universe—at the risk of a new math.
Take for instance:
I have walked down our math where the mortality rate states that the squared distance between two deaths equals the sum of the squares of black bodies in each headline coordinating between their sins & innocence. Sometimes, the square shape shifts my body into a triangle where I rehearse the intake of a bullet, or I’m the equal of a ghost who died from the same equation elsewhere.
Whichever way it is mathed, I am the hypotenuse of My father in a triangle who lived long enough to outlast his insanity. I have come to the end of my skin. Now what is left to outlast? My insanity or the triangle?
Paul Chuks is a freelancer, poet, and storyteller. He is of Igbo descent and resides in Nigeria. His works have appeared or are forthcoming in The Atlanta Review, Hobart, Heavy Feather Review, Trampset, Anomalous Press & elsewhere. He is a reader at Palette Poetry, Mud Season Review, and The Forge. When he’s not reading or writing, he’s analyzing hip-hop verses or moving his body rhythmically to the songs raving on his roof.
