I watch your body break into another gourd of palm wine, saying the mouth of a great man is the mouth of god taking his first step into unconsciousness.

Your mother sobs silently in a distance where her body is a load in the mouth of a graveyard, a broken wine bottle & a pothole honored with the leftover of the rain thickened into mud, a bird born into darkness, born to see things the world hides of the dead, tweeters on a cherry tree.

But on days like this, you are fire, you are a man seeking a way out of himself like cities where boys trespass borders for gin sachets.

You have heard her cry before, the day your village became Gomorrah & spat fire & the sacrifice it wanted was little boys whose guards were lost to sand song, fire dancing behind you in a mud-sucked T-shirt, she sobbed, before your body found the sea & ran into luck.

But today, she wishes to grab you again from the fire swimming close to your head, the way light comes for the sons of darkness but you are miles away from clothes, your naked body dancing Kathakali in the eyes of market women, & your mother, is just a sack of rotten bones in the mouth of a graveyard, she is calling through the breeze, she is crying in your head, but it’s nothing, you have heard her cry like that.

– Fatihah Quadri Eniola