ISSN: 1941-4137
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
Prosper C. Ìféányí writes from Lagos, Nigeria. A Finalist for Phoebe Journal’s 2024 Greg Grummer Poetry Prize, his works are featured or forthcoming in the Oxonian Review, Black Warrior Review, New Delta Review, Salt Hill Journal, South Dakota Review, The Offing, and elsewhere.
July 17, 2024
the burning rosebush
for Kofo
Chance. What is the probability of anything
happening these days?
The earth is spinning on unfathomable legs.
The girl I loved yesterday does not remember
where she placed her heart:
what is the chance she ever happened to me?
What is the chance we get anything?
These feelings are not prunable — I opened
myself like salvaged-yard windows
to love; the human in me kicking and prodding.
The sharp-shinned hawk of memory swerving
around the boulevard. Today, everything
lays cold on my palms, energetic, like saltshine
and pliable like death's clay.
I used to be frightened by pelicans,
I used to be bewildered by things that just stilt
over water and amble headlong.
Maybe that's why I am still mad at my father
for not fighting for my mother. Maybe that's why
my heart knots a little prayer
for the burning rosebush in my dreams.
What are the chances of anything happening?
Gold-leafed painting that outlasts
the hands which wrung it to sunblast —
And the grief keeps coming. With its one crooked
finger. Casting its shadow on the plaything
of my memory. It begins subtly:
a slow cascading knife trying to unwind
everything I have built in a hurry.
The tiny balls of fur my mouth emits in the name
of a God light years away.
Sometimes I stay silent and sleepless again
when I feel the world taking a shift —
Sometimes a different sound; a spilled jar
of honey on the dinner table. A roundlet of fire
razing through shared nights that seemed then
forever. Now, the air smells of coal
and bitumen. The air is punctured by departures
of trains and bodies shapeshifting in a heartbeat.
Steady at first. Then methodical.
Slowly, like a creaking bedstead — until the fine
head which nestles there
crashes into splinters of light.
Glass: A Journal of Poetry is published weekly by Glass Poetry Press.
All contents © the author.
All contents © the author.
