“A Brief Understanding of Shelving”

Creators of Justice Award 2021 | Second Prize: Poetry

Joshua Effiong is a lover of poetry & here he finds freedom. His works has appeared/forthcoming in Eboquills, Kalahari Review, Shallow Tales Review, Rough Cut Press, Madrigal Press, Warning lines, Hearth Magazine, Mausoleum Press, Ghost City Press, Acropolis Journal, Tilted House, Clandestine Literary Magazine, Augment Review, Cypress Poetry Journal, Aganpathus Collectives etc. Author of Autopsy of Things Left Unnamed. He also find joy in photography and reading. Connect with him via Instagram @josh.effiong and twitter @JoshEffiong

& like most days when the sun colours my skin purple. My mind becomes a tourist in our family house,

perusing every nooks and crannies. I sight a yellowed tray of steel with flowery designs, mother calls it tray of hope, says

she inherited it from her mother, says it’s mine to own after her disappearing. You see, I learned this transgenerational

            theory of shelving—the possessions of things; broken, lost, and unnamed—from my family tree.  

Let’s say I walk into the ghost of my past and I only perceive an admixture of sweet and sour remembrances, does it mean 

my body is an incubator of plight? Say I look into a mirror and crack a smile, and caught a glimpse of the demons that punctuates my sleep. Calls me beautiful when I feed his

appetite. Horror slips through the fenestrations of my skin and compete for oxygen in my blood wonder how I wander

into unknown places? I bath in this liquor of uncertainty. &make a river with my breath. My heart is desert. The river

licks my throat clean, & I lost sense of smell. I close my eyes and everything is 

             –a bloody battleground, here the wind taste like vinegar. 

Every now and then I soak up in the sun ray, allow it perform this art of exorcism. Perhaps, salvation is nigh. The

redemption of a yoked pride. Mother once told me I harbor the sun and the rain, in other words, I am joy and pain, & a 

plethora of their vicissitudes. So, I begin my unbottling; snatch my soul from sliding into a shadow, whisper a lullaby 

to hypnotize my demons to slumber. & I only dream of paper planes. Let’s say I groom a fire within my bosom, its smoke 

chokes these thoughts of regret. would I taste freedom? my distaste a dissolving? Here, I stray into a bush of wild roses, 

their petals scrape my flesh–this is a sacrifice for peace, & a baptism in dew.