Borderlines
by Chiwenite Onyekwelu
When I dream about poetry I dream about it in borderlines. For example. Instead of moonlight, I say Luz de la luna & watch the Spanish sing. In another dream, I’m running because the country I call home has been set on fire. At the Immigration someone says, No pigs & I imagine a dancefloor in Lagos. Like everyone I’m half drunk & I’m swirling around with my jeweled feet. I say, could you imagine Emi elede & they laugh because here, I fit in. Because here the music the music. In yet another dream, there’s no word for pig, so he says Svaagat meaning welcome meaning feel safe. Somewhere in his throat, a light. Language is such a personal thing. Like orgasm. Or like that other dream, where– astonished–an American screams Holy cow so I try to poetize it in Bangladesh: tsarki sani. Language is a personal thing. Otherwise tell me why, despite where I look, a holy cow is more funny than fuss. I imagine its chubby neck, the prayer beads around its wrist, imagine it moos during devotion & kneels to its own vegan god. There are nights all I ask for is a dream breathtaking as this. Let the poems enter me, peel me open like coneflowers in summer light. & if not the poem then the beaded cow within the poem.
Chiwenite Onyekwelu’s debut poetry chapbook, EXILED, is forthcoming in Red Bird Chapbooks. His poems have appeared in Cincinnati Review, Adroit Journal, Terrain.org, Frontier, Palette, Chestnut Review, ONLY POEMS, Ubwali Literary Magazine, and elsewhere. He is the winner of the 2024 Idumaese Alao Prize for Literature. In 2023, he won the Hudson Review’s Frederick Morgan Poetry Prize, and was a finalist for both the Writivism Poetry Prize as well as the Alpine Fellowship Prize for Poetry. Chiwenite has a Bachelor of Pharmacy (B. Pharm) from Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Nigeria. He’s on Twitter as @Chiwenite_O
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What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “Borderlines”? For a long time, I had an uptight notion of poetry. I saw it as a genre of literature only. However, I now understand that before its aesthetic utilities, poetry is first a means by which poets communicate their thoughts. “Borderlines” was my attempt at showing this. In writing Borderlines, I did not want a poem that aims, advocates, or desires; I just wanted a poem that exists. The expressions in the piece (like holy cow, a man calling another man Pig, the dancefloor in Lagos; etc) are things we hear and experience in our different societies. All I did was bring them together and say: Look, there is poetry even in our most ordinary affairs. Also, former Young People’s Laureate for London, Theresa Lola, once described her writing style as spontaneous. Often, we impose a predetermined path on a poem, rather than letting the poem lead the way. Lola’s technique was helpful to me in avoiding this. I didn’t think about the lines. I just wrote them roughly as they to my mind. For me, therefore, the most fascinating thing about Borderlines is its spontaneity. In addition to this, I love the humor– even more humorous is the fact that the humor was unplanned. I love that the poem surprises me with each twist, each ordinary twist.
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Submissions
Poetry, creative nonfiction, and fiction/prose poetry submissions are now closed. The reading period for standard submissions opens again March 15, 2023. Submit here.
Upcoming
09/09 • Rae Gourmand
09/16 • Chiwenite Onyekwelu
09/23 • TBD
09/30 • TBD