in the beginning, God said let there be light — day split from night. but i still burrow inside the cave of my body searching for day, sun, or even a mere crescent. grief is a needle kneeing into my throat, & i am fucked up like a cracked tape. i hold a rose, it morphs into a bushfire which means there’s nothing this body can possess without wilting away like a deciduous leaf. yet, i don’t want to be the gravity pulling my father to munch the dust. i trace my bloodline, a catalogue of wars. i, too, have been fighting my whole life against something i can’t win, like a windowsill trying to escape the burden of a bird’s nest. all i want is to be a sun that never sets, a cave that repels darkness. but i look in the mirror & my reflection shatters. tomorrow, i hope to be a thrush stuffed in the chest with madrigals; so, i make a tiny hole in the wall of this cave & welcome the light.
Eniola Abdulroqeeb Arówólò (he/him/his) is a Nigerian emerging writer, frontier V and an undergraduate of Mass Communication from Kwara State University, Kwara, Nigeria. He is passionate about inequality, politics, domestic violence, and child rights. His works have appeared or forthcoming in Brittle Paper, Rough Cut Press, Poetry Column ND, Rigorous Magazine, Afreecan Read, Ice Floe Press, Rise Up Review, Inverse Journal, Better Than Starbucks, Lumiere Review, B’K magazine, In Parentheses Art, Rulerless Magazine, and elsewhere. He is the August winner of PIN-10 DAY POETRY and has been shortlisted in BPPC’s June/July Anthology. In his leisure time, he is either writing, reading or binge-watching cartoons. Twitter: @eniola_abdulroq.