…in five years you’ll have everything you want now.
but you could be dead. or spiraling through a heartbreak,
clutching therapy, pitching the forty-fourth funding plan.
watching your neighbor’s cat prance around your living
room. babysitting a stranger’s pet. measuring the wingspan
of a promise before it melts. or the earth could be kinder.
plant you between the sea and the ship. strapped to floating
wood. inheriting flotsam. or in a foreign country reading
a map in a foreign language, picking clues towards an eatery
where the food tastes like a flunked test. learning the metarule
for trimming the distance to your mother’s voice. or in a class
taught by an accent too fast for decoding. or in a city coloured
by protests. trading banters for bullets. or behind a computer,
ordering heavy-carat rings, supplicating:
come fingers, come woman.
lord, lend me the boldness of a parachute, defying gravity,
defining gravity. everything returns to him who waits. even
absence, knitting the lonely into the lonely into the lonely,
dress rehearsals for a timeline of longing.
Michael Emmanuel is a creative writer from Nigeria. His works have appeared in Jalada Mag, Ake Review, Twelve Mile Review, The Poetry Shore, Afritondo, and Trampset. He was a finalist for the 2022 Awele Creative Trust Award and the 2022 Stephen A. DiBiase Poetry Contest. He lives in Lagos.