Samuel Ugbechie

MORE THAN A FLOOD

Rain fell last night. This morning, floods scourge
the city, waters wash the buildings down. And down

the market square, a vein of kiosks is split open.
Roofs are sore like a burr of inflamed tongues,

and the shed—the slanted shadow that once shaded
us—bends like a canted neck, a gush of water

pushing phlegm out of its mouth. I stand here
with you: a flood survivor, watching residents—

knee-deep in the water—splash all their fears
and sprinkle a thousand gossips on pulses

made of mud. Tongue to tongue, ear to ear, they pull
their burdens away, while your palm holds mine

and braids my veins and tells my bones you’ve been
here before. Your flood, though, was different.

It was familial and human. It was not a flood,
but it flooded your childhood. First, a whoosh

the edge of your father’s fist. Then the ink
on a divorce paper—the deluge written with a pen—

pitting your father’s name against your mom’s,
drowning your home, snuffing their hugs off the paper

-backs of your skin, ripping out every touch that once
hewed their kisses on your body. Who knows

why floods invade us? Who knows why our lives,
like roads, are beaten like a city-size teapot:

full, sitting on a burner of disappointment? The residents
have lost a handful of kiosks and stores, but none

have lost a family like you: standing still, looking
at hope inside this wild, mild, tender flood, and tightening

your palm on mine, and walking as though pulling me
out of the water, out of the flood—knee-high, soul-deep—

unlike the way it was when you were 8, left all alone,
walking yourself all by yourself, out of your flood,

without a hand to pull you through. Tell me how
you sniffed above water. Tell me how you pulled

ahead of drowning. Tell me what scars and tissues
make our survivals worth it. Silence. A shuffle of tiptoes.

A pair of damp shoes: the way your soul felt, lost
in its camp, screaming helplessly on the flood

-washed sand.