Yesterday Nigeria Killed My Friends by Anurika Ngozi

1. Do you wonder about how life leaves a body?
If it walks or runs?
Swims?
Slips?
Slides?
Rides?
Do you ponder on its gait?
If it’s steady or rushed? Measured or not?
Observe how it travels through the body and out,
taking nothing with it but breath.

2. Yesterday my friend tweeted
“Nigeria will not end me”
three hours before Nigeria ended him.

3. His head bobbed from side to side
as it lay in the crook of his mother’s elbow.
I wondered if the bobbing was the last
of his life leaking out of his neck
onto the warm cement
or if it was from the motion of his mother’s body as she
cried out to the heavens.

4. Yesterday my friends sat on the ground
in peaceful protest,
green and white flags flying high above their heads
in the humid evening air.
Together, they sang the National Anthem,
voices brave and afraid
even as the Nigerian army assembled
around them
firing endlessly into the crowd.

5. I think about what God was doing
when the first gunshot rang out.
I think about the limp bodies they carted
into army trucks, about the governor who
announced no fatalities on TV the next morning.
Is justice its own god?
Unable to be bought or moved or bound by other smaller or bigger gods?
Are we born for slaughter?
Children of sacrifice?
The joke?

6. What do the dying see behind their eyes?

Anurika Ngozi is a writer whose work tends to revolve around patriarchal violence and the negotiations women make or don't make in their efforts to live in a world where they cannot escape it. She is currently completing her MFA.