Attached—unintentional & other poems.
The Nigerian Army admits killing a 16-year-old
boy by ‘mistake’ (People’s Gazette, Aug. 7, 2024)
—for Ismail Muhammad,
It is August & the city is still lonely, still grieving its loss.
I am here—here, where innocence is a synonym for sin.
I am here—at sarkin pawa street, samaru. & I am walking in the
sadness of the path that led to this poem. at the end of the road,
a boy with a bullet wound is recoiling back into the body
of his innocence. or maybe death is a recycling, as the rain will
soften itself into the ground, only to escape upward.
believe me, I was there for a moment as the boy’s body, cold & bloody,
lifted itself upward like this sentence at the end of my throat.
the bullet, too, unforgiving, reversed itself back into the gun,
rebelling against the hands of the coldblooded men. the truth is:
there are no hopeful songs than the ones bleeding a mouth.
listen, the boy is singing into the air: I’ll outlive what kills me. I’ll survive.
I want to believe his song as I walk towards him. I want to
believe that the bullet is still lurking somewhere in the gun,
not in the boy’s chest. but death is a reality you don’t want to accept
but the body, at some point, will. Tell me, at what point does a
bullet fulfil its purpose—is it when the trigger is attached to the
wrong hand or when the gun becomes silent, turning a deaf ear
to its own quaking at the crime scene? at a funeral, the imam
says what we own is what we’ve lost. that
even our own bodies are memories walking towards extinction.
I do not disagree. but I want to know how to own a
poem without its body searching for haunted ghosts: bodies
waiting to be pierced by bullets, with no fingerprints attached—
or unintentional. without my country’s faux mouth searching
for the tenderness of forgiveness in our bones.
Note: the line “attached—unintentional” is an adoption from Zaynab Iliyasu Bobi’s poem titled “Jana”
SCREENPLAY
Nigeria is where shame goes to draw its last breath
—Elnathan John
Memory begins when grief becomes a verb.
But isn’t that the tongue mistranslating? Language
is as lethal as its politics. Memory is a recycling
of grief—the way the curtain opens to children,
age the length of innocence, in a courtroom.
Their fear, taking the shape of questioning what
will kill them—the hunger of men or the one
gnawing their intestines? Outside the view, the
world seems brown, fearing the dark silence of men,
but what about the marigold rust in their voices?
About conscience, I am afraid what death it might
bring back into life in this story. Politics, too, is
as lethal as its language. the children you see in
court today only came to greet their loved ones. I am
watching through the screen: the man on TV,
with blades on his tongue, gutting an open wound.
isn’t it predictable, the logic of cruelty? I mean,
give a man a knife to protect himself, & watch him
turn the handle against you. I know the way through
remembrance. it will take eternity to get back to
where we left our humanity. if all were to be lost
before then, let the road soften itself in welcoming.
Let it not be as tragic as the tenderness of recycling—
the premonition of the death of a child to his mother.
Half pill, half flower, half music
this poem is based on a therapist prescription: x=half pill, y=half flower, z=half music
sadness begins even before the
body knows its suffering.
still, a grave is not enough room to
hold the wound the flesh would not heal.
the earth is too unkind
to return what it swallowed.
& healing, too, is a mouth: a door
out of a dark room or an echo of silence.
silence, even in rust, will
cut open a body.
there are better ways to grieve the dead
you couldn’t save, says the therapist.
by which he means:
x cleave open out of the
dark room of your being.
y flower your sorrow into the
broken notes of nightingales.
z swing against what unhinges
a boy from music.
zyx your body is the wound.
xyz your body is the healing.
ESCAPADE
at Kaiama, Nigeria.
because we knew less than to follow our death. I, & a
band of boys stretched into the forest, into the green lushness
of memory— gnawing at my home’s backyard. even as the
road covered us in a film of brown, our feet trail after
the dusty path— forgiving its insolence. as the end of the city
crawls towards us, I tried to hide a hummingbird’s voice in my
throat, mistaking it as mine to keep. another bird drifted by,
spilling its song into the terrace of the air. I imagined the
betrayal of the tongue— how it never holds itself from
revealing what is hidden as a secret. here, I traced the origin
of escape: the tongue of a river escaping the mouth of
magiro mountain. something like leaving, but not quite.
in my past life, I would name my death an escapade, but not
in this memory. the older boys, broken out of the shell of their fear,
plunged into the river. as if to say joy is the hummingbird
that perches on the cashew tree, staring at our nakedness.
say: the bird owns the art of music in its throat & yet the art of
escapism in its wings. I still don’t remember if this is a persuasion.
or a warning that even if a bird sings joy, it takes flight at
the sound of a gunshot. there’s no guilt in forgetting that a man’s
devotion to fear is also a devotion to survival. because how else
does a body survive drowning if it hasn’t practised swimming?
at the end of it all, the evening air softened into silence. as the sun,
at the sight of herdsmen with their cattle, recedes into clots of
the blackened sky. we reversed in the path that would continue our
death, towards home. the next day, the news headline read:
two corpse found at the base of a river after being hacked to
death during a herders-farmers clash in kaiama.
