By Michael Imossan
The world may end with a mango squashed inside my mouth. Its yellow splutter splattered over my rose-colored lips. Father, forgive me for I have turned off the lights on my neighbor, held food in my mouth when another was hungry, shooed a stray dog off my veranda and back into the streets—the rain’s sharp teeth biting through its fur. I have laughed at a man’s broken leg, cut down the green of a sprouting pumpkin. I have set fire on a bridge after crossing to the other side, slammed the door against a needing brother, his tears a tiny drizzle pattering on my back. I have beaten my mouth into the shape of love when what swelled inside me was sex. So much cruelty has lived in the brown of this palm. So much music has been strangled by these frail hands. Yet the world keeps singing me a lesson; that terror and laughter belong to us all. I know now the oneness of things and how it flows through all that we touch, through the lush hydrangeas and their waving hands, the wind, the river and its gentle lips. I know now that the beggar’s tears are also my tears, and when my brother cries, it is my laughter being wounded, that the clattering teeth of that stray dog belong to me, that the rumbling stomach of my sister’s son means there’s a poem dying inside mine. I know now that sex is sweetest when steeped in honesty. And when my neighbor offers the last of his breath to night’s wet tongue, I know my death is also waiting by the corner. Father, mercy is all the body wants—the grace of walking into one’s death tender and alive.
Michael Imossan is a poet, playwright, and editor of Ibibio origin.
