I Call My Sexuality My God: My Shampoo and My Watermelon Juice

By Victoria Ifeolu

My book is divided into three sections merged into one title, “I” “Call My Sexuality” “My God”. I is the section that houses personal poems. Call My Sexuality is the section that comprises of poems that address issues arising with being female and the appropriateness of being sensual. My God is the subcollection of religious and moral poems. It blends three diverse pictures into a rich literary text. In December 2018, "I Call My Sexuality My God" was selected by the New York Times to be featured in the "Discovering New Titles" segment

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Mar 23, 2017
• ISBN: 9781524587932

Victoria Ifeolu

Victoria Ifeolu is the Author of two novels, a poetry collection, a short story collection, a collection of prose-poems and a novella. The most prominent of them all is the mainstream poetry collection titled I Call My Sexuality My God: My Shampoo and My Watermelon Juice, which made its way to The New York Times, The Kenya Today, and The Reader's House, London. Her literary awards include the Nigerian Stored Products Research Institute Essay Prize, the Mazariya Prize for Poetry, and the Jason Pinter Black Writer Scholarship. In 2019, she was shortlisted thrice for the Ad Hoc Fiction Prize. Her stand-alone poems have been published in widely-read anthologies, including The Tracery of Trees by the Poetry Institute of Canada, and Where The Mind Dwells by Eber & Wein, PA. Shortly before completing the Thriller MBA in affiliation with the International Thriller Writers (ITW), she earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in English (Literature) from the American University of Nigeria. Born in 1998, she identifies as a pro-Beauvoir literary scholar, who enjoys inventing her own theories.

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Copyright © 2017 by Victoria Ifeolu.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017903254

ISBN:   Hardcover             978-1-5245-8795-6

              Softcover              978-1-5245-8794-9

              eBook                   978-1-5245-8793-2

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

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Rev. date: 03/02/2017

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

I: Section One

The Prize-giving Stage

Music Treats Treason to the Tricks in Our Reasoning

I beheld Jesus

Burning Ocean

Snow’s Kiss

Entangled Knife

I Walked

Who Makes The Selfish Roll?

CALL MY SEXUALITY: Section Two

Myrrh-maids

Daughter Slaps Altar

Come For Supper

Anointed Pervert

Daughter, Daughter

Virgin Mary’s Pervert

Flexible

She Was a Good Woman

Hot Huts in My Heart

Deserted Appetizer

Pail Pain in Three Pails

My Account of My Motivation for Clogging Laundries Every Monday

Soak the Air in the Mistresses’ Care

The Red Brine

I Know You Know Me

Invaluable Brains Know Their Treasure Too

Pizzas for My Man

The Sovereignty of the Suffering Tree

Forever Like That

Biological Logic Needs Lord’s Magic

Let Ivy Leagues Speak the Truth

First Love War

Whether She Be Gay or She Be Straight

Prodigal Wife

Strange Human Miracles

You Should Love My Grandfather

MY GOD: Section Three

Oven of Maya

Naked Throne

There’s Blood on His Gift

The Eleventh Commandment

The gods in the God of Humanity

Noah’s Curse

Take Me to This River

Author’s Note

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would never gain the ability to declare that I ever started this book, nor handle the solidity of confessing the best sin I ever committed (working on this collection during school time) before acknowledging that it was the Almighty God who gave me the power, the strength, the talent and the creative intelligence to come up with the ideas that mother this book and their development thereof. My life is a delicate proof of the idea that God still uses people: I wouldn’t have ever come this far had I not sat in Christian Bok’s rudimentary creative writing class and had Joshua Whitehead as a TA; that is an unfair summary for the understandable sake of the I-find-to-be-very-professional page limits in this awesome contest.

Coming to the human makers of my inevitable existence; my mother and father: Dr. and Mrs. J.K Ifeolu, I would like to make use of this platform to thank them for providing my sister and me with the best education we have gotten so far in the history of the centuries in which we were born and re-born. My sister, Ayanfe Abigail Ifeolu is my creative lantern; my lucrative master; this whole collection has nothing on her.

Finally, the owners of my heart are the true recipients of this life-changing award, which the Holy Spirit has assured me I would win by His power and not mine: Mirabelle Eze, Kaithlyn Manalastas, Katherine Kvellestad, Laurel Simonson, Simone Natasha, Kiden Miller, Hunter Sullivan, Rachael Welsh, Edah Joachim, Phoebe Mah, Adeoti Fashokun, Victor Ajiboye, Riches Sunnie-Ododo, Benjamin Adegbiji, Tosin Oladokun, Kalesanmi Olawole, Victor Mobayo, Oreoluwa Olaitan and the chosen unmentioned few. I could wish I had more friends, but I believe in quality above quantity, in the same way that I wrote more poems than these, yet kept the rest in my laundry’s tea. Dear judges, drink my wardrobe’s tea: I prepared it all for you…

I

(Section One)

The Prize-giving Stage

I swam up the podium to receive the Swans of sodium for drawing the boldest conidium in the science stadium

The teachers looked for the girl who swirled the pearl down the Troll called Mathematics

The Principal embraced the breeze as I raced the bees to raise cool honey above school money

My mother shook paws, mowing lawns with smiles of sauce, which sawed her aisles of waffles

My sister sang Rihanna when a cistern hanged the earner with a Spinster named Anna, while a blister rapped the Anthem

I cast news in new blasts, chanting in fast cars on lasting clasts

My chicken pox boxed in a disguised fox, as I got loved first on my mother’s chocolate frost

I made friends with the flowers, talking to the showers, chatting with the hours, weeping for the owls and weeping in my towel

I had no friends in school, but my hat knew French in its skull, because my heart renewed rents in full

No boy had come then, no coin had turned ten, no foil had gunned men, as no toy I’d condemned

My bowl of soup cried in my bow of cookies, lied in my bow of candies and died in my bow of poop

I enjoyed the company of myself, endured the tumbling of my elf, and enjoined the symphony of my cells

I prayed and fasted when the praise of farting had sounded too long

I regarded my head as God and regarded God as my head

I discarded gulls as my galls and embedded girls in my gods

I embedded gods in my goods and embedded goods in my bed of embryos

I stole the page on the prize-giving stage

Music Treats Treason to the Tricks in Our Reasoning

I’m doing well in college

I sew a well in storage

I drew hell in hostage

In high school, I was slightly loose

I hide the bell in the lighting