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INSTRUCTIONS FOR SUCCESSFUL INFIDELITY & OTHER POEMS
• INSTRUCTIONS FOR SUCCESSFUL INFIDELITY & OTHER POEMS
May 25, 2026
by CHISOM EZE
INSTRUCTIONS FOR SUCCESSFUL
INFIDELITY / UNTIL YOU SMELL
OF NOTHING
BUT THE SUN
1.
When finally your wife asks why you shrink from her,
say to her: people are not figs
say: we were never meant to grow toward the same light.
Make no mention of the new soil
you have since discovered, how your name is a seed
in her mouth. How you bloom there,
a tender, foreign plant.
2.
Delete the texts that call you darling in another tongue.
In the torrent of your lover’s shower, peel back the layers of skin you have pledged to her.
Cleanse yourself of her, the way she says your name as if it first belonged to her.
Scrub until the scent of her mango soap has filled the drain.
Rinse yourself of her embrace.
Lather again & again.
Lather until you smell of nothing
but the sun.
3.
Reclaim your name from her throat. Know that it returns to you thin, stripped of its particular music.
4.
Unlearn the knowledge of her body at each parting. If even this is possible.
Unlearn it as one forgets a childhood country:
first the rungs of her slender throat,
then the lamplit street in which she held you.
5.
Take your lover in places that do not smell of home.
Touch her only where the walls forget.
The marbled restroom at the Thai place & the tiled floor of the hotel at Rumuodara
& that club on 51st, where bass drowns out all language & in your truck,
with the windows open, so the sin can escape.
6.
Hold all your names in your mouth: husband. lover. liar.
Witness how they bleed into each other.
Know that there is no such thing as a clean betrayal,
only the slow unbuttoning of the soul,
only the body starting to grieve its own duality
*
THE COMMODIFICATION OF TRAUMA
After Safia Elhillo
The air is swollen thick with a failed attempt at lavender
when the poet arrives. All good poetry is merely language, he says
& perhaps it is this stench that feeds my disagreement,
more than it is the glib language.
I smile with all my crooked teeth and think of his many salvations:
His blue American passport.
His even bluer eyes.
His summer home overlooking the lake.
His travel papers were worn soft from wandering.
Boarding school in a foreign country, ivy engulfing the bricks.
Of course.
Of course, all good poetry is merely language, because what does he know
of a body, necklaced & burning at the T-junction or a woman screaming next door
while you hide, fetid in your shame, afraid, but alive.
What does he know of a first name
that breaks in the mouth like a knuckle?
What does he know of a consulate officer's scorn?
Of course, because when a patronym is passed down
like heirloom or fine china, when the map folds open
to your accent, you fail to understand the simplest things.
I am from a country of sojourners.
Nation of border leapers.
People who knew neither summer nor lake, turned back at every square of the border.
I owe my poetry to no one language.
Only the women who call me beautiful, who curl hard into my sinful, soft mouth.
The dark women who are my only country.
You who ask for no papers. You who ask only why I wake gasping
& call me survivor in exchange for my story.
My body is my only passport and it is stamped
& stamped with every departure
& isn’t this the poet’s truest currency?
Isn’t trauma?
Isn’t it this tender burn? This singing blister. This evidence
of having survived a thing & made it beautiful.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
CHISOM EZE is a writer and poet residing in Port Harcourt. He is the winner of the Shallow Tales Review’s 2024 Best of a Shallow Year in Poetry, and a finalist for the 2024 Kofi Awoonor Poetry Prize and Verdant Poetry Prize, respectively. He was shortlisted for the 2025 Brigitte Poirson Literature Prize, and his work has appeared in the Shallow Tales Review, the Kalahari Review, Isele Magazine, and elsewhere
*Cover Image by Cafer Caner Savli,on Pexels