A song filters in the atmosphere, it is the Chaos
penetrating the only crescent I enrooted in my
father’s fragile skin. Daily, I placed my tongue
at intervals between prayer and gunfire and
I grow memories from moth and dying infant.
There is a country in the middle like a dream,
growing to poison — And I am too beguiled by
the tender mouth of a knife. It means experimenting
the graph of memory and gun noise. What is
contentment, if not the way we commune our
bodies in a poem? Today I recognize the strength
of a bullet racing toward a body in his mid-twenties.
Which is to say, Sometimes, I carpenter myself a Shadow
and mother says, it is the eligibility of birthing that separates
me from a molecule. Perhaps, a poem confides a grief
and I am a boy still undoubting the science of recycling
into a plant or manure. I now carry the wing of a dialect—
Je veux juste vivre. Lord, espy me and feel how I yearn
to touch my skin at the wake of every blue morning,
before this body breaks into multiple chrysanthemums.
Anderson Moses is a poet from Nigeria, His works have been published or forthcoming in many literary magazines. When he’s not writing, he’s designing.
Featured image by Elīna Arāja on Pexels
