pulling at both sides of a miscalculation: your penchant for old things,
old fabrics faded at their centres, heavy brass jewelry and leather strings that
schoolboys, you included, would collect for no reason; Nairobi city pamphlets and giant, giant mirrors –
that had been granted the ability to double both space, and time –
they all fall away. now,
endlessly exposed, now and again, and especially then when we
stood, at ocean’s edge, morphing in and out as the waves, asking for the day’s compensation:
knowing full well this is what it means to love.
not anyone’s idea; not even an idea, to begin with.
whatever it is, from the harshness of the morning’s first gritty coffee,
through which we swallowed the previous night’s fists, and indigestible,
days-old Kiswahili sayings, we pretend to be okay, even having forgotten how,
or more importantly, when, to read, or what it means to look at each other
without the words between us.
some sort of primer for forgiveness.
you fold everything in the grainy velour of your birth: strings, coins, matchsticks,
green soda bottles –
returning to the intangibility of time.
left behind, as you walk away, the last I see of you is your photograph. an obliteration yet
your substantial form, this fading away into its own
resolution, both reminder, and that which it reminds us of. another old thing.
and another, one we’ve both known, carried around like sin – [and like sin in its duality of weight and lightness]:
you are not dead, but you have never been much alive; and
not alive, either.
Michelle Angwenyi is a Kenyan, from Nairobi. Her work attempts to investigate time and memory, and is inspired by childhood, dreams, and music from all over Africa, particularly from the seventies and eighties. Her poems have been published in Enkare Review, and she has fiction forthcoming in Short Story Day Africa’s ID anthology. Michelle would one day like to write something about birds. She is currently doing an MPhil in Zoology at the University of Cambridge. She was shortlisted for the Brunel African Poetry Prize in 2018.