All my friends are learning to shapeshift
into God. One opens

his body into a collection of beads. The other
burns out himself with

incense and fish oil. Every attempt is a new
way to worship something

different. Say, a redwood nailed to the East.
Say, waterbirds

swallowing half the fishes in the sea. Most of
the people I know are cone-shaped.

Always protruding. Always piercing into
everything that

doesn’t smell like God. In one story, there is
a man collecting

milk teeth from another’s lungs. In the same
story, he poisons

an oxygen that isn’t his. They say there is no
difference between murder

and suicide. I tell them it all depends on what
was killed.

My friends are finding it hard to stay alive.
Firmament is the root word for sunrise.

But even at that, there is no need to let too
much darkness into our night.

This article appears in July 2020.

Chiwenite Onyekwelu is a Nigerian essayist and poet whose works appear or are forthcoming in Chestnut Review, Gutter Magazine, Prairie Fire, Rough Cut and elsewhere. He serves as chief editor at the School of Pharmacy Agulu.