Hunt — Aeesha Abdullahi Alhaji (Poem) — summary and reading brief

# What happens in the poem

The second fragment moves to the cutting and drinking. When they cut its "chattering scales" and the blood runs, the captors drink desperate "to slack nostalgia's thirst." Violence is bluntly tied to ingestion: they swallow "yesterday," mouths stained red with lost promises. A swiping claw kills a brother while jaws snap up a soul. The stanza records silence: no cries, no words, only the act of consuming.

The final fragment completes the cycle. After they drink, the beast screams, breaks its binds, and flees. The golden memories they hoped to hold begin to fade. Hands find pikes and swords again among familiar petals, and the thirst returns — this time described as dry, turning the past "into ashes." The men who survived still hunger for the past.

• Nets, pikes, swords: instruments of capture and control.
• Chattering scales, claws, jaws: reminders that the captive is a living, active force, not a passive store of memory.
• Childhood flowers and familiar petals: small, domestic details that sit alongside violence and link memory to place and habit.
• Blood and drinking: portrays nostalgia as something bodily, intoxicating, and dangerous.

These elements work together to show a pattern: capture → consumption of memory → temporary satisfaction → escape → renewed hunger. The poem keeps returning to physical sensation (breath, smell, taste, wounds) rather than abstract philosophizing about memory.

# Themes and reading points

The cyclical structure matters. The final image — hands finding weapons among petals, thirst returning dry — suggests repetition rather than closure. The hunters' tears, the killing of a brother, and the beast's eventual flight produce a moral shape that resists a tidy resolution: the past cannot be bound and drunk into permanence.

# Author note

Aeesha Abdullahi Alhaji is credited as a Nigerian writer and poet whose work appears in several literary journals. She is a resident fellow of the Ebedi International Writer's Residency. The piece was published on Brittle Paper in September 2026.