My mother turned into a pillar of salt
when we were hungry;
she invited us with a lovely smile
to pinch a handful, a bust,
and we walked away chuckling like pigeons
with chunks of a bird’s heart
hanging on a tree.

We watched her die in installments
when she twirled in the slim thread of anger,
each time the river swallowed us,
or the sun sank into our fingernails,
or the moon collided with our foreheads;
she was the daughter of leaves, grass,
herbs, the horizon of a healer,
and the fire burnt her blood,
our mother, made of our flesh and bones,
the truth eating inside us.

I saw her on a landscape of pain,
excoriating her heart to a million slivers.
when hunger stoked her like grief,
she was the echo of our voices,
floating in our blood,
as time fell away.

Jonathan Chibuike Ukah is a Pushcart-nominated poet from the United Kingdom. His poems have been featured in Ariel Chart Press, Atticus Review, Zoetic Press, Unleash Lit, Down in the Dirt and elsewhere. He won the Voices of Lincoln Poetry Contest in 2022 and The Pierian Alexander Pope Poetry Award in 2023. He won the Unleash Creatives’ Editor’s Choice Prize in Poetry in 2024 and was shortlisted for the Minds Shine Bright Poetry Prize in 2024. His poetry collection, Blame the Gods, published by Kingsman Quarterly in 2023, was a finalist at the Black Diaspora Award in 2023, as well as the Grand Winner of the Wingless Dreamer Poetry Prize in 2024.