Self-portrait as Cervine

Marvellous Mmesomachi Igwe

You will remember life as the wolf clamps

down on the soft of your organs. Your ribcage

an ark of meat and bone chewed open. The

summer you spent frolicking in the green

field with your father. It was beautiful, the

field. The sunlight so sharp it gilded the vivid

leaves. The bright halo suspended in-between

his antlers. He was majestic, your father. That

summer. The one where he goes down in the

lake of lions. Those antlers the last thing you

see. Those little tips of hardwood brown.

Two flailing hands drowning in a sea of teeth.

The world refused to stop then, so how

would it now? In the blink of an eye, winter.

In the blink of an eye the hollowness of death.

The storm. The white blizzard. You will

remember it all—this frost, this fang, this

claw digging into you for more. You will

remember the hunger.

MARVELLOUS MMESOMACHI IGWE is a poet from Port Harcourt, Nigeria. He has been published in Agbowó, Chestnut Review, Electric Literature and Palette Poetry among others. He is the winner of the 2024 Kukogho Iruesiri Samson Poetry Prize, co-winner of the 2024 Poetry Column NND Chapbook Award, a finalist for the 2025 Rhonda Gail Williford Award for Poetry and was shortlisted for the 2025 Alpine Fellowship Poetry Prize. He tweets @mesomaccius.