Home is anywhere the body speaks stillness.
Art by Steve Johnson on Unsplash.
Home is anywhere the body speaks stillness.
After Usoro Ernest
Regardless, we are all mocked by pain,
The black painting of the night heavy
like the weight of our grief. But because a
Promise is another lie named after bravery.
I choose to survive before the devil laughs
into my morning. In the mouth of my desire,
I’m open and wide like a field. The hibiscus slithering
through me, to find mercy from the edges
of my emptiness. What love remains calm in the
face of denouncement? Look how I tame the
Wildness of my palms, yet the loneliness stretches
into the depths of the garden. Pink as my tongue —
that unfaithful thing with the faithlessness to
break the breath of my life. I swear, the most
sought-after thing at the end of a poem is how
the body rebels against suffering. The Muzzein says,
home is anywhere the body speaks stillness,
Where surrendering is an act of kindness
from the heart. Beloved, all my life, I have carried
my apologies in the same mouth with prayers,
Litany them into lament. Truth is, I do not know
which will saviour me when the world turns
to devour my little life. Maybe the prayers.
Maybe apologies.
Art by Susan Wilkinson on Unsplash.
Prayer Trance.
For all common Nigerians
Terror diminishes into my presence, I am
in the trance of a prayer. My hands holding
Vast softness because I have taught myself that
The world doesn’t sprout with chaos. Today,
the woman I love will return like a flower,
And the world won’t betray the bloom of
her body, They won’t bury her face any more.
Instead, I will pluck her eyes into the wind,
the way fishes pluck baits from fishing nets.
She must witness my wholeness; my nakedness.
How I pelted into a bouquet of roses. Learning
the tender repetition of lone the apparition; hovering,
like sirens, like birdsongs from the canticles of the white-eyed morning. I want to morph into the
ethereality of my stars. What does it mean to collide
in a space once deserted? Once I held silence in my laughter, vomited it out, and watched it make movements.
The simulacrum of a long walk, hand-in-hand with
the woman who first showed me how to vault
my body, how to makeshift the body’s terror into a tulipwood. I believe every wound-eye was once a
place of pious worship—the cathedral of unending longings jumping out like frogs. Christ, I have
mistaken you for the voice of every child begging
by the roadside. In the tears of women blotted
for survival. In the eyes of a man who wouldn’t let me
name him after God. And today I cannot forget them,
nor their inevitabilities. There should be an end to
chaos. My country should be sprouting heavenly miracles.
Art by Fons Heijnsbroek on Unsplash.
My Lecturer’s Guide on Freedom.
After Michael Imossan
In the name of blood
televised all over the country,
Pretend it doesn’t affect your
family. Cut the Malina
trees into a fine woodlog, and erect
an altar for the deities of
your country. Kneel as if
Your grief doesn’t hurt. Again,
Pretend history doesn’t exist
—the page where Kayode
was shot at Lekki toll gate
on the eve of his birthday.
Teach your cats the beatitudes
of surrendering and patience.
Pray for naira not nightfalls
I mean, if your empty stomach
can sustain you, maybe God is closer.
And when you are done with
praying, measure the size of your
body into a coffin like a cobra.
There’s something special about
blood that makes it red-coloured.
Perhaps, you can never predict
tomorrow’s grief. And which temper
the knife will sizzle into your throat
or your wrist. But if you want freedom,
you know how to get it. Ask your
father how he got his own in the 90s.
A revolution is a sacrifice you pay for a good country.
Image by Pawel Czerwinski on Unsplash.
A simple prayer.
After boys like me.
A lone bird perches on the entrance tree
of our house. I am battling with things
The universe has taken from me. There are places
in my body cracked by sorrows, which
I cannot [exert] escape. The pressure is
getting worse. Day by day, I think of my
life and how weightless it is, like a paper boat.
My room knows the temper of my prayers;
how in dreams I approach God for christening.
Tonight, I will walk into the lurid gap in
my head, and Wait at the precipice of Bethel.
I heard God’s angel will come here to unfurl
wings before dusk with his charity crimsoning
like light. I will wait patiently for him like a dog
waiting for his master. Lord, If paradise is full,
Please, let me not stray like a bullet. Let me not
be a poet rattled by the corners of the knife.
Art from The Cleveland Museum of Art on Unsplash.
The City is Feral.
After the people of Benue, Jos, and Kaduna
The city is feral and everyone: the motorists, the girls, the man with his head carved into the sun is running,
in hope for safety. In creche, I was told that whatever is fragile doesn’t hold a spot for crisis. And sometimes, the gods
must learn how to become survivors. Listen, I have carried bare ripples on cold nights, meek for the angels
sequestering wings from love. Even so, I wonder how much gravity can uproot a dead body. O, how towering
was heaven before I was made a lover,
delicate—& thicken. Still, there is something about
the magic of flights, of birds afflicted to their nest-hole. What if affliction is the only thing left on the hands of a
country beleaguered in terror? Who knows, how long the sky shapes for a skin? Unbleached. Everyday, something is
broken—or dead. Say a boy falls prey, say a boy becomes a ghost. Imagine the cremation—the
disappearance—tragic like rapture. The dolorifuge sunk in stillness of their red wounds. The city, mild and
blackened. Believe me, I do not want the Psalmist song—my soliloquies are dark and enough. I, once a happy
dream, now in emptiness. See, these sorrows are feral and bleeding. And this home—faceless. Always
shapeshifting. Always swallowing.
