EDEN

by Chiwenite Onyekwelu

Poetry Runner-Up of the Inaugural Surging Tide Summer Contest
Selected by I.S. Jones

​Every circle begins from a dot. 
          I watched  
my niece accumulate: foetus  
          before the  
bulge before the soft curl of  
          baby hairs.  
Where I’m from femininity comes
          with instructions.  
You’re born & you learn to  
          shrivel,  
be a girl with enough drawers in
          the mouth  
to shelve her tongue: Unlike those
          women you  
read about, the human animal in
          them wide-eyed  
& neighing aloud. Unlike Eve. But
          everyone I’ve  
known has at one point desired a
          bite from the  
forbidden fruit. It’s a human thing
          to reach a  
wall & think only of an opening, or
          wreck. At fifteen,  
my niece DMs sometimes, & we
          stay up late  
chiselling new holes: Yes, you can
          be whatever 
you want. Yes, a woman can work
          in any field.  
Yes, you’re smart of course. Yes,
          you’re beautiful. Yes, 
don’t let him gaslight you again. She
          knows I mean  
it when I say, let’s go grab the fruit &
          unlike Adam,  
I would not blame her for it. I’m
          learning that the 
human life is first the size of a poppy
          seed, before 
accumulation. I say accumulation, &
          think about 
growth. I say growth & think about
          Hawa or Eve— 
the ferocity of a body in starvation. In
          her the first  
human animals awakening, screeching,
          reaching for 
the one door that could lead them out.

---

Chiwenite Onyekwelu, 22, is a poet and essayist. His poetry appears in Adroit Journal, Chestnut Review, America Magazine, Lolwe, Gutter Magazine, Rough Cut, and elsewhere. In 2022, he was a runner-up for the Foley Poetry Prize, a finalist for the Gregory Djanikian Scholars in Poetry, and was most recently shortlisted for the Spectrum Poetry Contest. He won the 2020 Jack Grapes Poetry Prize, and serves as Chief Editor at the School of Pharmacy Agulu, where he’s an undergraduate.

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