Emmanuel Mgbabor
mama folded her body in the corner
of her room, languaging her grief
into boxes of prayers, a cathedral of hymns
leaking through the edges of her lips
like ink drops.
& tonight, death seeped into mama’s
room with a shovel, & exhumed
breath out of her body– this is how a body
wears the silence of a broken
monochrome tv.
my grief spreads on my chest like tumor–
the demons in my wardrobe have
grown old & are drunk,
which means a boy would sneak out of
the world through the eye of a needle.
& leap is another word for suicide.
a boy would cocaine his mother’s grief &
sniff in all her storm.
in this poem, everything grief touches
grows dreadlocks. i stretched my prayers
into a javelin & hurled at the lips of heaven,
launched so hard that i broke
my collarbone.
maybe the clouds would grow soggy
eyes & cry mama’s spirit back to me.
Emmanuel Mgbabor is an award winning poet, a prolific storyteller, and a content creator. He sees creative writing beyond the corridor of being a mare hobby, but as a career to be embraced. His works have been published and widely read in several magazines including The African Writers Review, Zenpens, the shallowtales review, amongst others.