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In: Anthology

Wishes [In Reverse] – Michael Emmanuel

…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.