The Summon, by Moses John Agbaeze

Dear Readers,

Start your week off right with this brilliant work by Igbo poet Moses John Agbaeze.

We feel truly blessed with the amount of incredible submissions we're receiving, especially from emerging writers! 

Please read, share, and consider writing something yourself.

Take care,

Cassandra

P.S. Haven't ordered our 2022 fiction chapbook yet? We're going to print at the end of the month and you'll definitely want a copy.

Here’s proof that my lips parted nicely.
Metal testimony: 
I stand before the judge, swelled, yet, I chopped in bits, like
dementia—like slipping a duster over a white marker board.
He further tries to push testimonies into his log.
I pull a knot, the essence being warped and swamped: 
where bliss soured and a glass of juice, like the motive, numbed
a body.

​A glass is the serpent of Eden. 
Lady— a consensus adjutant carrying in her hands the summation
of a night where lady plus man is a spasm of emotion.
Here, behind a shut-door, a haven for decent, yet, revolting spats
of emotion. 
A glass, its distance to the mouth, several gulps after, and it’s 
an ulterior scheme of forced satisfaction, an implosion.

​I don't know how to read the judge an expressive face. Say, I’m a
shameless man. Aren’t these ones here to spit into the wind?
Wind, a wide traveler? I birth a life: didn’t I do it and liked it?
I didn't order the night. I stayed respectful to fits of emotion,
laid a glass, and used the restroom.

​So, I carry my body, a swinging pendulum gently to the enclave just
below the judge’s odd stare. Ruffled, I’m easing towards
hibernation. Slippery, I’m not writing my body to a fall. I hope
he understands this reluctance.

​For rightsake, I hope she leaps for truth and at once, tell that night the
night’s way— fits of emotion,
a glass of juice,
rest in a room,
room, her kingdom!
she'll stand here and say that night in black 
and white, a tipsy night. I answered to the tips of her fingers,
the loops in her palms driving me on a free ride. 
This day was born that night.

​Think of her testimony as a body in rest, palming her jutted belly 
to bliss if motion was constant. 
A beautiful thing lives inside of her, blooming like tendrils, but
I shrink at duty when duty becomes undue, forced, apt denial of
some sort. They'll grow up asking the wrong kind of questions.

​I'd want it differently, I’d want un-blanking the judge, past this
cesspool of loss that’s called us rest, tinkered to a halt. 
Let’s say that night; color these witnesses into an active voice, 
a glass stained with her whorls, 
and her lustful tongue, I couldn't refuse. 
I want flowers, like a garden: pruned and chastised into a beautiful
woman. This way, they ask the right kind of questions, 
I say how blessed I am to acknowledge the night as God.
I’m liable.

Moses John Agbaeze is a writer of Igbo descent who uses writing, especially poetry, as a tool to tell the human story. When he's motivated to write, he writes poems and short stories that elicit strong behavioral traits in humans, like relationships and love, and how the environment plays a subtle role in shaping lives. He's a graduate of Geography, University of Nigeria, Nsukka, so when he's not writing about love or family, he's looking up places in a map and ranting about how he thinks Geography is the mother of all sciences.