Your body is a house of god. Or a collection of boys. By Mbanefo Chibuike & you were twelve when a boy first called you baby - & you ran into the eye of the night. Your body learns how to hold names on Fridays and whip them into the confession box two days later. Your body wishes coyness isn't flirtatious - how a house of god is a good girl & a bad girl is a collection of boys. But Handel's Hallelujah is a god’s song you hum before giving a lover this body. The first time you picked pieces of your heart, ducking on your tears, your fingers wandered towards your vulva & you watched the emptiness fill you. Mother could be right - a girl's body is a way into suffering /and shadow of a god,
it reminds you how pain and pleasure pass in a funeral & what everyone says about a woman being "too sexual." In the church, a priest drums into brittle walls, the dangers of promiscuity /and his tone betrays your frustration, your body is unlearning shyness & there's no canvas to paint the beauty of sex. But you cannot continue to hide your desires on cold nights so that a husband calls you chaste /and your body falls into the house of this god while he's into another woman's. You choose to express yourself for what you couldn't remember is broken - the satisfaction or sin - /and the pieces of boys flung into your lips on the altar of a god & society. Read More about the Author Here - www.nigerianwriters.info/mbanefo-chibuike
11 Comments
Jesutobiloba
6/4/2021 07:14:55 am
This is a beautiful piece as well. It vividly highlights the struggle women face to keep their bodies ‘holy’, our bodies are a lot of things, house a lot of things, is capable of making us feel a lot of things. This topic is grossly unexplored as well.
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Oluwatumininu Adekunle
6/4/2021 07:33:08 am
"How a house of god is a good girl & a bad girl is a collection of boys"
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Ojo Olumide Emmanuel
6/4/2021 06:57:39 pm
The peak of this work is "choice."
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EmePeter
7/4/2021 07:08:02 pm
The piece is explicitly written.
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9/4/2021 03:55:16 pm
This is what most females go through in our society. Society tells them who to be and they feel so different. If you are bold enough to question their beliefs they call you wayward. More room is given to the man to be what so ever. Society even supports his promiscuity, they say that's what nature wants him to be. Tell me, how?
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Mustapha Enesi
10/4/2021 08:20:11 am
What drew my attention the most was the use of really good metaphors.
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Mustapha Enesi
10/4/2021 11:28:22 am
What drew my attention the most was the use of really good metaphors.
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Ambassador Daniel Amakor
10/4/2021 04:55:26 pm
There's actually no canvas that can ever in a very detailed detail, paint the beautiful picture of sex.
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Odafe
16/4/2021 05:15:05 pm
Brave, sensitive, grasping ... All, words fit - yet hardly enough - to describe Mbanefo Chibuike's artistry.
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Tammy
17/4/2021 06:15:19 pm
The poem is derivative and uninspired. It feels like any of the myriad of words about how religion suppresses female sexuality and how sex completes a woman.
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Ajayi Solomon
18/4/2021 02:03:48 pm
This is a story told poetically,
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