Ghost Girl
She does not exist
But to staff torment
She is vengeful earth
Unsleeping with foment,
Infernal glass eyes:
Inverted sunrise.

Legend denies her
A berth in the womb,
She rises for drowning,
The bait under cwm;
One skull-flash she’s gone,
No succour, no song.

Breeder
She does not exist,
Freak tale ingenue,
The whistle-white wisp
On tyrannical blue;
Nine months on the bench
She’s issued revenge.

It’s under-the-nether
Where she’s taught to shoot
But she must return
To where once she was mute;
It’s she converts men
To cult of regen.

Furiosa
All empty until
That instant she fills
With voiding the lungful
As Great Mother wills;
She’s fulcrum full-breadth
Ease-axle through death.

What holds up the sword
Predestined to rule,
Yes that is a belt
Of fated red jewel;
She’s Orion, you see,
Rediscovered a she.

Killer Crone
She does not exist,
The seed she refused
Is flash on her muzzle
She bleeds out the news,
The motion of scythes,
That moment she rides.

It’s alien seed-stock
She ports in her purse
What might be made last
She clutches at first
Her into the breach
Is breeder to teach.

Lactifex
She does not exist
They made of her tuber
Before their re-green
So drugged-up for stupor
She’s cloistered from brood
Lost secret of food.

There’s a pilot flame
Glowed from indolence
To manage her bounty
Throughout her suspense;
She’s prepared the address,
Mother made manifest.

---

Uche Ogbuji was born in Calabar, Nigeria. He lived, among other places, in Egypt and England before settling near Boulder, Colorado. A computer engineer and entrepreneur by trade, his poetry chapbook, Ndewo, Colorado (Aldrich Press, 2013) is a Colorado Book Award Winner, and a Westword 2015 Award Winner (“Best Environmental Poetry”). His poems, published worldwide, fuse Igbo culture, European classicism, American Mountain West setting, and Hip-Hop influences. He is editor at Kin Poetry Journal, founding poetry editor at The Nervous Breakdown, and runs the @ColoradoPoetry Twitter project.