Ejiro Elizabeth Edward
The love my country has for me is a gun (2021)
I was trying to present a history of feelings, not the history of the war itself…
Svetlana Alexievich. Granta magazine
Shoes? No ! . Tennis shoes? No !
Track shoes? . Yes!
I spend my whole life running a race I never wanted in the first place.
My body stretched as a pole, transitioning between the living & dead. In my dream, bodies are piled upon bodies while a Red Sea floods the street & flows into the gutter.
One of the bodies rises from the dead and my body pantomimes in response to the miracle,
dry bones are waking up,
but there is a horror , slammed to this boy’s face, in his hands there is a flag & he stretches them out and he questions me ;
“What do you do with a country that is breathing
fire?”, my lips depart from each other and I say “Run” but before I do, the boy before me whose body is too transparent for flesh dissolves into water, water turns into blood, in my country everything you love must surely die.