Apocalypse as Everything I Hold Dear

“Pandora’s Box Reopened” by Sean Kang

When a sheep wears quills on its fur
it is either the pen is a desert

or the shepherd flays the sheep while
fleecing the rest of the flock.

Here, winter ermines leave black tips when
specialists say O- must not receive from O- in
love transfusion if both have an XY-Chro.

My exes said we could not be journeys but
rattled beds; bonobos not Eurasian beavers.

My new lover demands that my dictionary list
girlfriend and bro as pseudonyms; two sentinels
of falsehood cowering before the blades that evert
bodies questioning Coulumb’s first law.

My dawgs say real men do not have lacrimal glands.
No other lie has made me faker.

I do not want to be the actor this stage craves.
I know the pyre for characters that
fail to interpret scripts.

Yet I do no want my bags in a pariah’s land
I know the anhedonia in the cocoon of
strangers.

It is hard to hate a tree I love its fruit,
harder to love a fruit I hate its tree.
So I am learning a new way of survival:

giving my soul dregs so it doesn’t die of hunger when
perched on the surface of streams to spawn like the
mayfly it has become.

About the Author

Chiemeziem Everest Udochukwu’s works appear on Lolwe, Second Chance Lit, Salamander Ink, Kalahari Review, Eboquills, Fiction Niche, and elsewhere. He is a first-class graduate in Linguistics/Igbo and was a finalist for the Quramo Writers’ Prize 2019 and the Nigerian NewsDirect Poetry Prize 2020. He writes from Awka, Nigeria.

About the ARTIST

Sean Kang is a sixteen-year-old sophomore attending Korean International School in Seoul, S. Korea. His hobbies are indulging himself in any creative and artistic way. He is currently putting together his portfolio for university.