Inna Effress

It’s not necessary to behead the yolk-haired woman
who dances with children in the streets of Eko

dispensing food to shiny bodies, injecting antidotes to limbs
as bloated ox-eyes tick along the motorway

where they haul coal and hawk Medidi (by day)

Take heart, ife mi, and sleep easy, for eventually she, too, will hang herself
by the sturdy branches of the shadeless tree

though it may not be in my lifetime – or yours

Monsoons bring mushrooms above the loam, as if from nowhere,
like bright misfortunes from a single fruit, of the same soil

that bears the bitter red bark of healer’s tea

Old Sangoma makes her entrance. The accused is a child of twelve. Small bones
scatter across the floor, and the patients, unfit to see beyond the ore in their hands,

attune their ears to the clack of her charms

The doctor eyes them, her spindly arms swaddled in majestic robes,
outstretched, sleeves winged, gaping

like the dark, breached mouths of birth canals

whose scarry walls efface what takes root there. Fresh wails spill onto slabs
of long-silenced hungers, which can be revived neither by

the art of divining or of dressing a wound, only washed

clean by the brown rain coming quickly now,

                        chanting– See, see.

Inna Effress

Inna Effress

Poetry

Summer 2024

Divination