there was, in fact, a chicken (a false start to a drama)
which came first? the chicken or the enemy?
a woman chooses which fiction to birth,
a child pushed down The Nile
from old mother to new mother.
new mother calls her daughter enemy
says she often feels like she gave birth
to her enemy. which came first? daughter
or enemy? chicken or mother?
child in mother, child gestating mother.
keeping her warm till she hatches
with memory intact
for a drama. her instinct says
it’s your job to bring yourself to the role
or let the role change you.
there was, in fact, a chicken.
the daughter cleaned and cooked it as taught,
and they ate the meal on sabbath.
Daughter joked: the chicken eaten never existed.
Mother said: that isn’t funny. your joke
is a trick. I will never forget.
End it there. But Daughter rises,
picks up Mother,
plucks her feathers gently,
lays her in the basket.
she rests, relieved among the reeds,
their death gentle and resolute
this, the beginning of all beginnings:
egg, enemy, mother
Voyeur
Sooner or later,
God was my new stepdad.
He took over the house,
splayed his big hairy legs across both sofas
like who gon check him.
My father grew hoarse,
then out his mind, wrestled out,
as the game of men goes.
That was the summer my mother ended
all arguments with
God is Watching.
This, the reminder of who claws
her heart, her backside.
I knew better than to stand outside
the bedroom window,
watching her gasp the word,
blue fire on the edge of her tongue.
Liz Femi is a Nigerian-American writer, actor, and an NAACP Theater Award Nominee for her solo play, Take Me to the Poorhouse. A recipient of Writeability’s Right to Write Award, her work has been published in Michigan Quarterly Review, Wild Roof Journal, Stone Poetry Quarterly, West Trade Review, Good River Review and others. She is based in Los Angeles and Atlanta and is a 2025 Sundance Episodic Lab fellow and 2024 Pushcart Prize winner.