On Watching Passio Christi

By Chiwenite Onyekwelu

Shortlisted for the 2026 "London" Literary Prizes in the International Poetry category

The man on the cross is not Christ. His hand
punctured with a nail is simply a hand
 
             punctured with a nail.
             By virtue of pain,
 
a wounded body can sometimes mistake
itself for God. A tenderness of swans;
 
             it’s what the movie
             demands from us.
 
Somewhere between starvation & throat,
the astonishment of seeing a body
 
             undone. Saint Veronica
                 wipes his face
 
& there is a camera to catch her love,
a shutter swirling like an eye opened in salt.
 
             I see Christ in pixels
            & quartz. He will soon
 
be gone, but so what? A dead God is
commonplace. Like lichen wrapped
 
             around bracken fern,
             algae blooming north
 
& further north. Delight, the immutable urge
to watch the revered hurt.
 
             The Romans knew this
             more than anyone else;
 
maybe the Americans too. There is a scene
where he offers his body like bread,
 
             highlighting, I think,
             the cannibalism
 
in the lamb of our hearts. I love this audacity
of Christ, this knowledge that it exists
 
             a point where the line
             of hunger blurs.
 
On the cross, he opens, like a man-sized wound
& I can’t believe, cannot imagine,  
 
             he ever thought this is a world
             worth dying for.

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​Chiwenite Onyekwelu is a Nigerian pharmacist and author of the poetry chapbook Exiled (Red Bird, 2025). His works appear in Hudson Review, Cincinnati Review, Rattle, Adroit, and elsewhere. He’s a 2026 Gregory Djanikian Finalist and winner of the Blossom Poetry Contest. He was shortlisted for the 2025 Evaristo Prize for African Poetry, the Alpine Fellowship Poetry Prize, the Quarterly West Poetry Contest, and the Black Warrior Review Summer Poetry Contest.