Small Horizons

My father tells me if I spread my feet wide enough

   Its oars will touch the opposite ends of the third mainland bridge.

            Winter is seldom different.     In New Orleans, every insane man

Has Shomolu at his core.     Sky cast teal, my father’s open mouth leading into grief 

     Registration webinars. Where the morgueman forks my

              Nigerianness for proof of life.                How I know home has 

                   Longed for me—the manner in which my father visits

With my rocking horse in his breastpocket, but returns

With a half of himself.                             I live his other half. This half,

                  Seen through webcams, is seen differently.           Black men

   Call absence firstborn.  White men call it fellowship. The difference

              In the calling is hid in the blood of its history.            Both

                             Callings have had their happy endings. In them, I see 

             The simulacra of my father.          Sometimes teaching my

    Feet to home.                       Sometimes holding me as though to heal me.

      Babangida Airport swallows grief-carrying men. And grief-

                           Carrying women return into fuchsia-colored taxis, their faces

Pressed to the white of passport photographs, Beautiful Nubia

                   Singing Seven Lives from the radio. Unique, the driver said.                                              

        Because Radio Lagos had only been announcing missing

                                People these past six years.        What all the missing had had 

                                           In common were their fire-eating habit and the steepness of 

                          Their history.             Strangely how the driver asks me if I’m

                            Comfortable, how close within my stitches come undone. 

Well, we live for small horizons. My mother’s hands idle 

        With history of amorphous communions. With halves of father boring

              Down the carnations.          

Later as the choirs sing Jerusalem t’orun, we simultaneously shove

Sand into my father’s face. At once crying, then at once laughing.

*Poetry Translation Centre & Book Buzz Foundation Project