“Unmoving” by Uchechukwu Umezurike

April 16, 2025

Poetry Pause is the League of Canadian Poets’ daily poetry dispatch. Read “Unmoving” by Uchechukwu Umezurike. Due to its formatting, this poem is only available as an image.

Unmoving

By Uchechukwu Umezurike

My mother doesn’t know I can hear the sounds she attempts to disguise with water sloshing around the toilet sink. In the corridor, I count each nasal syllable, the upswing of her breath behind the door. My father is in the sitting room, unmoving, like an indoor plant— he might have been a mimosa. He is watching a film about mass graves, tumbler in hand, his gin—the colour of rust. Outside, the sky is a blue shoal with giant floes massed along its banks. A crow screeches, like a noisy cyclist, in our backyard, where the lemongrass, with its dry lances, is turning rust. The aloe, whose gel soothes my mother’s face, has become a dead starfish. The evening air rebounds the joy of children chasing a ball down our potholed street. I imagine their mothers watching from the veranda, while my mother lingers in the toilet before a cracked mirror. My body is suddenly rubber left for hours in the sun. What I feel is a punch to the chest. There is a log lying in our backyard— gnarly, ashen, and lonely, and I wish my father were like that.

Uchechukwu Peter Umezurike is an assistant professor in the Department of English, University of Calgary, Canada. His critical works have been published in the Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, Journal of African Literature Association, Men and Masculinities, Journal of African Cultural Studies, amongst others. Umezurike is the author of literary works such as there’s more, Double Wahala, Double Trouble, Wish Maker, and a co-editor of Wreaths for a Wayfarer.

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