Precious Arinze | The Author Reconsiders Her Past Love | Poets Resist

Precious Arinze writes poems and essays when she is not sitting in Lagos traffic and contemplating the poor choices that have led her to make a home in this city. Her works have appeared in Electric Literature, Brittle Paper, Edify Fiction, Kalahari Review, Mikrokosmos, Green Linden Press, Berlin Quarterly, and others.

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Also by Precious Arinze: The Casualties Hymn Of Clean Water When Hunger Becomes Prayer

Poets Resist
Edited by Logan February
July 19, 2019

Precious Arinze

The Author Reconsiders Her Past Love

it is october again. we are in our little room. the sky watches our eyes follow one another as we make our living. you are wearing your old flesh like a costume at the wrong kind of party again. a dialogue about space and belonging, their errant quantities. here, the harvest of your laughter greens the seeds back into my earth. here, i only have to think of joy to be filled with it. the bruised peach of your lips. breasts warm and heavy as water. your two front teeth sundered as if waiting for something to pass through them. one night i tell you about the time i almost drowned. a week later you turn to me and say, the things we hold dear are just random fixtures. i want to hold you so dearly my phone no longer responds to my touch. i know now that we were shaped by a different absence. we never managed to learn which until the gaps in our language became something we weighed affection with. after a while, even our simplest efforts started to look like gardening. you say, love is equally important. you never say as what. i like to remember mostly the good days. the times we banished hunger together in our small kitchen. how you sometimes rearranged my stuff without asking. the mornings i loved you enough to not hide my sneakers. even the ones i had never worn. here, the oily glow of the electric bulb illuminates the silence guttered into guilt and longing above us. it is the middle of october, and the sky is watching us split desire between our bodies and the hands of our youth. the entire night sky arranges itself on our ceiling. you say, my absolute darling, we are going to outlive the moon. it no longer mattered who had touched us before. or where.