Drowning

By Haruna Abdulmajid

there is a boy drowning next door. he has a perforated intestine & his feces, slowly leaking
into his abdominal cavity. there is a boy and there are a lot of them trying to stay afloat in the water but
everything is going against them including the current. imagine starting your day at the edge of the
cliff; trying to regain your balance, trying to relax your airways, trying to reach for an inhaler you know is
not there. imagine finding yourself at the train station waiting for a train; a train that looks exactly
like your father or your mother or any of your relatives, a train you know will never appear. the problem is:
we carry it so well the world assumed it was not heavy. silence does not denote the absence of a howl,
sometimes it means the coyote is sinking deeper in the water. have you ever found yourself at the bottom
of the sea? your chances of survival winding down to zero; your father in a faraway village saying he has
no transport fare to visit you at the hospital; your mother in a frenzy trying to contain the news of your
predicament, your sisters at a motor park trying to make ends meet by hawking groundnut. sometimes
it appears to me that tomorrow is the paradise we’ve been waiting for. But then, who knows if that tomorrow is an extension of today’s darkness.

BIO:
Haruna Abdulmajid is the author of the chapbook, Things I Have Come To Learn About Sadness (PIN Chapbook Series, 2020). He can be found on twitter @Ampicillin_