The allophone of my heart’s phoneme
By Michael Imossan
—after Nome Emeka Patrick
My heart gravitates towards silence like a vowel moving towards destruction. Forgive me, assimilation is the process where life assumes the features of its antonym. At the expanse of the moon, I see a child’s face, a calabash, a vulture, the breath of a roving tiger — but no ice-creams. I do not know the morphology of happiness. Last time I echoed ice-cream to a seller, she offered me my mother’s corpse. Here is a fact: the difference between ice and water is stillness — and same it is with life and death. In this poem, death is a sound produced with obstruction from the vocal tract — by this — my mother was an undone prayer stuck in God’s throat, a voiceless velar in mid articulation. A dune of loss trails my body like a shadow. I am scared of darkness. Light skelters from my presence. The priest says my grandfather’s body is cuffed to my wrist, meaning, I am bound to dead things — even my lover’s breath is shaped like a coffin. Here is my belief: in the absence of water, tears could be bearers of happiness. Metaphors are relative — and I see happiness as a determiner pointing toward pain, as if to say: smile a little for the season of grief is at hand. At the balcony, I watch the sun rescind its essence. The moon’s refracted glow shimmers through the firmament. A wind brings me a voice “edim aya dep” which literally translates “rain will fall”
Which I interpret as:
water will surrender itself to gravity,
crash on a rock and break its neck
—even soft things break too.
Picturesque: At the ICU, my heart breaks like a syllable into rhythms, each rhythm carrying my mother’s withering breath. An aspirated throb is heard in the middle of my
Heart’s thumpings. Is this what they mean by having a heart attack? A boy swallowed by his mother’s undoing.
BIO:
Michael Imossan is a writer that likes to think himself a feminist driven by empathy, pain, and grief. He was longlisted for the Nigerian NewsDirect Poetry Prize, 2020. He is a winner of the Shuzia Redemption Poetry contest. His works have appeared/forthcoming on Inertia Teens Magazine, Small Leaf Press, Fiery Scribe Review and Kalaharireview. Chess and scrabble are his friends. He loves being in the classroom, either as a student or a teacher – he just loves being in class. You can find him on twitter @Michael_Imossan
