On the road, you will see them:

Brittle boys whose bodies are cities of grief.

Survival is a bird struggling under the claws of another bird.

After Sunday Mass,

A brittle boy took a tight grip of my arm.

His eyes were dead birds floating on water.

How cold are his palms.

The softness of a blistering hardship.

He is just a dead leaf. A language of loss.

My body is a collection of untold stories

about brittle boys. About how hunger

sneaked into the night and ate them up.

On holy days, we recite God’s words

like a spoken poem. But we forget that

God’s Heart is hidden in boys’ brittle bodies.

Offor, Oluebube Christopher is a graduate of Public Administration from the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. He is currently doing his National Youth Service Corps in Ogun State. Offor, Oluebube is a passionate poet and an ardent essayist who have won several writing Awards. In 2019, he won writing contests organized by the Chartered Institute of Personnel Management in Nigeria; the Nigeria Film Corporation; Academic Stand Against Poverty, etc. His poem, Broken, was published in The Muse 47; an English Journal, University of Nigeria, Nsukka. In his quiet time, Oluebube reads poems on rejections. He finds solace in writing.