The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: local remdies by Chiagoziem Jideofor

---

the warlike

(i)

mother has always been a bull of a woman. never smiles.
she made friends but wasn’t keen on keeping them.

on evenings, she would sit out on the front porch,
gather her favorite impressions into a pile.

as if to test a sitting brew, the neighbors would pass, offer greetings,
small talk—the hiking price of kerosene, the recent ban on importation.

like she cared to look less busy; swatting at invisible flies, huffing
and puffing like a pressure cooker. she earned her stripes this way.

(ii)

when asked, i say mother carved me,
—a side stool—from her concrete ideas of others,

that i retained the twitch in my left eye,
borrowed scowl it took the others years to notice.

how i became this adept at interpreting burden—
the deadpan ones, the ones with a mind to run you over.

---