Transitioning

Abdulrazaq Salihu

Through the lightness astral travel, I discover a tender universe where my hometown was never a battlefield and I have involved spiritual things and things in this journey. I happened everywhere. These days, rebirth is an alternative for patience. My mother’s father

is celebrating his one thousandth birthday and aging. He cries about losing a milky teeth and tells me a little of reincarnation. I fold my palms into a mantra and say, mother, do you not feel guilt? My brother says he wishes to die and tells me to break the blue-dark. Do not marry your words with your heart and pass. The moon follows the rhythm of lost and causes a strange winter equinox.

A parallel universe where people don’t age is the slow meandering of silence into a river’s mouth and my father sings of drowning first. In the middle of June of a particular year before Jacob got lost, a war broke free and ate my hometown.

A tree bends into a broken furniture and we all want to say home but we mispronounce it as love. But, I’m thrown back to a world where my mother buried the name of her home and its roots into her bullet-holed emptiness, a world where I reach out to my grandfather’s arm and he tells me how much old people hate aging.

About the poet

Abdulrazaq Salihu, X-gene is a Nigerian award-winning poet. He has his works published/forthcoming in brittle paper, masks lit mag, Kalahari review, pine cone review, rogue and elsewhere. He won the masks lit mag poetry award, BPKW poetry contest, Nigerian prize for teen authors, splendors of Dawn poetry contest and more.

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