how do you describe a genocide?

(Nigeria-Biafra War, 1967-1970
with a line adapted from Kristin Chang

a) pogroms¹
b) a police action²
c) incursion³
d) starvation⁴

1. my country/grows into the slaughter/it was born for/i storyboard origin:/where
a group of foxes is a troop/& sometimes a skulk/where a group of men is a military/
& also/a rape/because i’m Nyamiri/i disaster/a mixed race of bloodthirsty hawks/
calls my mother’s body vermin/& it will kill to prove it/

2. i translate my deadeadeadeadeadeadeadead back into weapons. once, i watch
my cousin’s sister spit blood in her sleep. i listen in on her dreams: the train solid
with bullet-baptized bodies, severed arms & legs, decapitated heads & fallen ears.
in another town, every nook & cranny is a gospel of teeth carving our bodies &
bones into commas

3. envy is just like hate & a flood climbs our house like a fever. i used to dream
we lived in a mud house in Sabon Gari & at the window is the man who pruned
away my brother’s arm like branches to the ground. in another city, my uncle sits
in front of the TV, watches a news report where houses go up in smoke & a
Hausa mob turns into a flood & swallows my tribe & calls it revenge coup

4. & i built my little brother into a war exhibit. all my dreams of the war involve
children with their tender skeletons revealed. hunger haunts their bodies & i feel
the spikes in my belly—the spongy ache of their gums. in Umuahia, my grandmother
says in some villages the three-year-olds have lived entirely without maize, sugar,
& salt. there are so many ways to die: for three days, my sister refused even
water after she contracted cholera

Read more from Issue 17.1.