Size / / /

Content warning:


note: pt means post-trauma and at means anti-trauma. both terms
are used instead of post-meridian (pm) and anti-meridian (am).

trust me, I’ll begin again exactly where my country ended me:
bullets against blood splattered body/against a broken skull/against silence.
________________________________________________________________________________

coordinate: 6.4358°N, 3.4472°E                                                           2090:10:20—4:00pt

 

cyborg x:            please, enter command.

poet:                    initiate the poetics of my history.

cyborg x:            /initiating/

: a body protesting thinks itself as a door
out of a dark room, a bullet, too. your body has
learned to carve many doors out of its darkness,
but the exit is never to see light. once, your
country shows you its wound. & you carried it
around in a body filled with daisies
/initiating correction/in a body filled with bullets,
weighing it on your palms until it becomes heavier
than your skin. the bullets, learning the new
way to pull a boy into silence. /Silence as the barrel
locks itself. into my skull.

into your skull.

cyborg x:        [whirring] initiating hurt…initiating/ wires w h i r r i n g.

                   /Shutting down/

                                                                /Rebooting/

                                                                                              /Hibernating/

 

“cyborg y and cyborg x exchange position, & the poet
inserts the crying wire into the exit wound of cyborg y”

 

poet:         initiate the poetics of hurt.

cyborg y:        initiating the poetics of hurt/

: if there’s anything to know, it’s that the bullet will
never give the satisfaction of hurt to the body
even when it hurts more to pierce through skins & bones.
2020:10:11:00pt/at: nightingales are crashing their
voices through the darkness of your home.
all that is left after, is of silence—languaging through songs:
throat to mouth. & then you came/you, against
the bullets/against your blood splattered body/against
your hemorrhaged-skull/against your body bursting
out of itself/as the peugeot 404 pushes you out from its
mouth/there, everything becomes a protest against
darkness /against silence/ silence as they shroud you into
reliving my death in this memory.

________________________________________________________________________________

                                  2020:10:21—12:00at/pt

poet:           initiating reliving/

activating voice over/

         I refuse to be shut down because
my country has robbed me of
living. & tomorrow,
it will not be
me again,
but you.
You!



Fasasi Ridwan, Swan I, whose works have appeared/are forthcoming in Anmly Lit, Eunoia Review, Lucent Dreaming, Afrihill Press, SprinNG, Kalahari Review, and elsewhere, is a Nigerian poet of Yoruba descent. He is a member of The Swan Collective. Find him on Twitter (sorry, X) @Ibn_Yushau44.
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