i.

The most important question regarding the secession of Biafra is, of course, whether Nigeria’s unity is negotiable.

—Al Jazeera News, 14th July 2017

Enugu City, 2100

When the train rattled past the night,
something mysterious crawled into us.
Maybe the roaring of its silver-encoated wheels,
or the hums of its engine, soft as a gangan drum.
Its metallic body engraved with
Nsibidi symbols pointing towards history.
We trail towards it, chanting a luminous script,
boys dressed in flowing white robes,
asking the land to be blessed with rain.
A boy mistakes the train for the spirit of a serpent.
Someone laughs at the joke,
and we wonder the distance between faith & extinction.
In this story, barriers are mistaken for difference.
The luminant leaves on the towering baobab tree
crave the last fleshed birdsongs. Under it, two women,
wearing digital translators, negotiate the price of a robot.
One speaks Edo, and the other, Igbo.
When the train comes to a halt,
the mud brick home shivers, as if in tension.
The flowing holographic signboards appear
before the skyscrapers mourning the lack of reach of the sky:
Passengers can now exit the train.
As it opens silently, you appear wrapped in a shawl,
the war we have avoided for a millennium
retracing its steps into your family. The men in black robes
chant a dirge as they bring in your body—
cold, silent, and bloody. Anyone could mistake
the Biafra national anthem for the bullet that took your life.

ii.

… without urgent intervention and investments, countries in Sahel risk decades of armed conflict and displacement.

—UNHCR, 16th November 2022

Zamfara, 2100

The only mercy I have left in me
was offered to me in a blue iridescent lake in the Sahara desert.
That haven of heaven, glorious in its killing of thirst.
All around were floating streetlights & their companions
of loneliness. There is a lot to notice as the road
walks by us. The birds and their sonorous voices on the
mauve mango trees. The field of green-eyed peas
anchoring their roots above the soil.
I have let go of every littoral liturgy
I have sung for the dead. I have no song left for the wounded
nor the drowned men. When I touch my tongue,
I reek of my mother’s death & my father’s
& everything that I’ve lost to these roads.
Like every man on this road, I’m a lost bird.
Sojourners, and citizens of no country—
displaced by the war that has lived in us
for a millennia. The cyborg body that I wear
proclaims the same cruelty. I fear my metallic hand
is only as rusty as the suffering it has held.
On it, a headline from 2024 news,
the increasing rate of banditry might lead to wide displacement
of people in northern Nigeria in the coming decades
as the country has been paying little to no attention
to secure its people. It’s 2104, and I pretend
the road will take me home. I pretend I do not
see what the men had killed: that the boy beside me,
with a prosthetic leg, is only a glorified thing
with its ribs poking through skin.
The story goes that the bandit stormed his village,
and everything withdrew into ashes. Like him,
I carry the wound of my dead in a nightmare
without a home to keep them from dying.

[Editor’s Note: Publication of this poem was made possible by a gift from Christopher Buecheler during our annual fundraiser.]