Behind the city’s concrete fortifications,
a hundred thousand fists clenched tight.
maize kernels from a burnt pueblo,
okra seeds stitched into hems,
peach pits in a child’s pocket, waiting.
We were taught to swallow hopes
whole, let them root in our gut’s darkness.
But now,
reality cracks.
A green finger nudges through,
uncurling like a protest song.
Grandmother’s ghost hums plant the riots,
her palms still smelling of soil
they bulldozed for parking lots.
This is how hunger becomes harvest:
a girl pours her mother’s saved rain
into the bullet hole of a streetlamp base.
Tomatoes erupt, bloody and ungovernable.
The land remembers what we buried
cotton roots tangled with shackle chains,
wheat sprouting where the jailhouse stood.
Every seed becomes a broken treaty,
a border crossed,
a name they tried to erase.
We are the compost of forgotten tongues.
Our stems twist through rebar,
crack foundations of the “developed” world.
When they spray poison, we grow thorns.
When they pave, we split the earth’s lips wider.
At night, the children whisper to the dirt:
We are the conditions.
Morning comes.
A sunflower turns its face
to the smog-choked sun,
blooming like a fist
learning to open.
Christian Emecheta is a content creator who blends writing, illustration, and computer science. His fiction and poetry grace prestigious publications including Arts Lounge Magazine, Step Away Magazine, and The Decolonial Passage. He is also a published contributor to Cranked Anvil Press, Walden’s Poetry and Reviews, and Mocking Owl Roost, among other publications too numerous to mention. Christian finds inspiration through reading, film, and the boundless landscapes of his imagination.