Ladies and gentlemen, that is how you use the implausible to explain what ordinary people find so difficult to put into words. As a poet, it is lines like these that make people call you a liar. If Kemistree were a man, she would have me crowned king of Yoruba demons because of sweetness like this.

I have not found a more original way to reinvent the love-at-first-sight cliché. Their heartbeats sync. They dissolve into each other. The language is soft, excessive, almost preposterous in the way love is allowed to be ridiculous when it is new. Kemistree lets us enjoy the sweetness long enough to trust it. Then she lands the first punch. Three months later, she became the punching bag. She had lulled us with a false sense of serenity and sweetness, and now it is time to punish us with harsh reality. Suddenly the earlier insistence that the love was “natural” becomes sinister.

Now the metaphor turns against itself. The love was natural. The violence is also natural. Natural, like a disaster.

This line makes me wonder whether some people carry the same capacity for intensity into both love and violence. I am not excusing abuse, and intensity is not its cause. But some of the same people who love with frightening force can also become frightening in anger. The lover and the abuser are sometimes two sides of the same intensity coin.

That is perhaps what makes some abusive relationships difficult to understand from the outside. The violence does not always arrive wearing the face of a monster. Sometimes it arrives wearing the same face that once made you feel seen, chosen, adored. The person who can make you feel most alive may also become the person from whom you need to run for your life.

Kemistree then begins to explain the expectations that drove this woman into the relationship and kept her there. She speaks to the norms women inherit about what makes a good wife, what marriage is supposed to be, and what kind of suffering should be endured in the name of love.

As long as we teach young women that their value is in the success of their marriages, we are setting them up for unmitigated disasters and lifelong failure. Life and marriage are tough enough as they are without someone’s entire sense of self being tied to whether a relationship survives.

There is also a wider cultural question here. What happens when endurance itself becomes a virtue? When leaving is treated as failure? When a woman is praised for how much she can endure, rather than asked why she is subject to it at all?

Kemistree goes on to insist that violence is unisex. The point is not that men and women experience violence in identical ways, but that cruelty does not belong exclusively to one sex. Violence is violence, regardless of who delivers it. This reminds me of Malcolm X’s hate that hate produced.

Then the devil arrives. She read his letter wildly, and somehow that empowered her to give love amnesia and agency to self-respect. What a poetic way of saying: the devil made me do it. Except here, the devil does not become an excuse for the violence. He becomes the messenger who finally forces her to confront it.

She realises that even domestic animals are treated with care, so why should a wife be treated like an animal that belongs in the wild? Dare I say that even some wild animals are afforded respect and affection? Maybe the metaphor falls a little flat because humans are more complicated than animals, but the indignity it points to is clear. From here on out, the self-respect begins to echo more strongly.

The woman has already been acting. Acting fine. Acting married. Acting happy. Now Kemistree turns to makeup, and this is where the poem becomes particularly inventive. The smile becomes a facade. The dark shades are no longer fashion. Concealer stops being a cosmetic product and becomes literal concealment. Beauty itself becomes camouflage. The face becomes evidence of a crime scene.

There is something almost too perfect about the metaphor because cosmetics already operate through layers, correction, covering, contouring, blending. Kemistree barely has to force the language. She only has to tilt it.

The dark shades cover what the prying eyes might reveal. The contour becomes a map around depression. Lipstick participates in a fairytale where beauty supposedly tamed the beast.

But this beauty is bought in a cosmetic store.

It is not natural.

That is a clever return to the poem’s earlier obsession with what is “natural”. At the beginning, love is natural. Then violence becomes a natural disaster. Now beauty itself is revealed as artificial, assembled to conceal the damage caused by that supposedly natural love.

Her face becomes a two-storey building.

The top floor is occupied by expensive makeup.

But the person you seek lives downstairs.

She just cannot take the shade off.

This is one of my favourite things about Kemistree’s poetry. The poems are punchy, succinct, and economical with words. She does not waste metaphors. There is also a split voice developing in the poem.

Not bipolarity in the clinical sense, but two selves occupying the same performance. One is the woman living inside the abusive relationship, carrying the fear, the excuses and the performance of normalcy. The other is the poet-advocate, the woman who can see the danger clearly and is almost shouting back into the poem.

That second voice becomes increasingly impatient. She does not want explanation anymore.

She wants escape. And perhaps that impatience is necessary because abusive relationships are surrounded by explanations. He was angry. He had a difficult childhood. He loves me. He apologised. He promised. I stayed because of the children. Kemistree does not tolerate any of the excuses; in fact, she violently pushes back against that last one.

It is a familiar sentence in Nigerian homes, and perhaps one of the most complicated. Many women remain in dysfunctional marriages because they believe staying protects their children, gives them stability, preserves the family or prevents social shame. But what does a child learn from a home where violence is normalised? What does preserving the marriage preserve? At what point does staying for the children become teaching the children that this is what love looks like?

Kemistree’s answer is not subtle. Run. She warns that staying may eventually make the cemetery the next landlord. That is brutal, but the poem has earned the brutality. By this point, politeness would almost feel irresponsible. Then comes the final instruction:

And there it is. The poem takes one of the oldest expectations placed on women, sacrifice, and refuses it. There is no medal for becoming collateral damage in another person’s redemption. Violent men do not need another martyr. They do not need another saviour. The poem rejects the idea that a woman must die proving that she loved hard enough, stayed long enough, prayed enough, endured enough or forgave enough. Jesus already did.

As such, I believe there is no vacancy.