I do not want to write how lonely
a car parked under the rain
in a deserted road sings,
but I’ve been on this road for ten years,
searching for a boy to translate the sweetness in my language;
searching for a door out of the fear sitting in my throat.
Nothing is constant; birds die & are reborn as clouds,
leaves go into the earth to become songs,
yet my love is passed down as sin,
nailed to a wall in a city where my body
is full of strange men begging to live,
nailed to balls of fire falling from the mouths
of preachers shouting in fields.
At night I sit in silence to hear my body
mingle with the stars in darkness.
I know how loneliness sits in a deserted town
and plays dead songs from parched lips.
I know how a body enters itself
to hide desire behind sadness.
I’ve been sitting for a long time,
waiting for a boy to heal the confusion falling in my heart.
The rain keeps falling & I don’t know
if the birds rising in my heart
is my body saying it’s alright to love
this wildness walking into a city on fire.
Romeo Oriogun is the 2017 winner of the Brunel International African Poetry Prize. His manuscript, My Body Is No Miracle, was a finalist for the 2018 Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets. His chapbook, The Origin of Butterflies, was published in 2018 by Akashic Books and African Poetry Book Fund. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Brittle Paper, Expound, LAMBDA, Afridiaspora, African Writer, and Prairie Schooner among others. He is the author of Burnt Men, an electronic chapbook published by Praxis Magazine Online, and was a Fellow of Ebedi International Writers Residency. Presently, he is a fellow of W. E. B. Du Bois Research Institute Fellow at Harvard University.