1.
i am not buoyant enough to hold joy spilling from a lover’s mouth. also, i eulogize my fears a lot & sometimes i am everything at the edge of my fingers. my lover holds my hands & whispers safe into the labyrinth of my right ear to calm the tremor dancing on my hands, but still, this revival crumbles at the foot of my demons.
2.
sometimes the frenulum underneath my tongue shrinks & fear grips my larynx until it shuts like a banged door. i want to say see, this is where it hurts, but i say see, & break down into tears as though i love to bask in consolation.
3.
outside my window, the wind blows dust & sand into my windowpane, & here, i am also a synonym for paralysis. i lie in bed all day, whirling my fears away. but last night an effeminate boy was bullied, the mob turned the street into a runway for him & filled their bellies with laughter. i sometimes imagine me as him, god knows, i would bare myself open until death finds me.
4.
if i die, what would my family write as my biography? aside education, maybe, so calm & gentle, cute & cries a lot, he holds his anger tight, even when his face turns red, he still wouldn’t let go.
5.
point to a wound & watch me stutter. sometimes amnesia got nothing on me. i once forgot a razor stuck on my thigh. i once forgot myself in a chapel, found myself hours later kneeling with hands rested on the pew wondering what i was doing there.
6.
if my fear succeed, & maybe you find me in a pool or in the hands of men burning with rage & bliss, set me on fire & please gather my ashes between pages of my favorite book. & in my next world, i promise, i will come as a happy poem.
Ugochukwu Damian is a 22-year-old male Nigerian writer and poet. He was one of the 21 mentees in the second cohort of the SprinNG Fellowship, and an alumnus of the Purple Hibiscus Trust Creative Writing Workshop. In 2019, he was the 1st Runner Up in the Nigerian Students Poetry Prize. His works appear or are forthcoming on African Writer, Barren Magazine, The Penn Review, The Rising Phoenix Press, and elsewhere.