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after Abu Bakr Sadiq’s Wormhole

the days have lost meaning, an overstaying dusk.
I’m falling and at the same time flying
through worlds. in one, my father
is planting cassava on the land
my grandfather will later be buried in.
at the same moment, I’m being born in
a hospital in the center of Lagos. my cries
cause an earthquake that my grandmother
feels, worlds away. & somewhere still,
NASA has just sent a probe into space
to take pictures of the solar system.
I breathe out & time & space explodes.
I rocket into a star, its light blinding
& gentle. I open my eyes & I am arms-deep
into the future. in a distance, I’m on Mars
teaching my grandkids how to skip a stone
across the water. & at the same moment,
I’m explaining why the clouds started
disappearing & why we moved off Earth.
& at the same moment, I’m hugging a
hologram of my sister who’s learning about
a new species on a distant planet. at the same
moment, my mother is cutting a synthesized cake
to celebrate her 400th birthday. we laugh
& eat meals replicated from waste.
time compresses & catapults me away.
I open my eyes & my father is driving me
to our new home at the edge of the world.
the wind tells me this is the genesis of
my despair. I breathe in & I am back
at the hospital. my mother has just given
birth to another girl. there’s so much blood
& the doctors are whispering my parents
should extinguish their hope for another boy.
hold on, I think I traveled past a moment.
I mean, Fortune, what world is this again?



Praise Osawaru (he/him) is a writer whose work appears in Agbowó, FIYAH, Frontier Poetry, The Maine Review, 20.35 Africa, and Uncanny Magazine, among others. He won the 2021 Valiant Scribe Poetry Prize, and has been nominated for the Best of Net, the Pushcart Prize, and the Nina Riggs Poetry Award. He is a Prose Editor at Chestnut Review. He’s on Instagram and X: @wordsmithpraise.
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