two decades & a year
by Praise Osawaru
& I, my mother’s surviving boy child, still appealing
for a rainbow—God’s hand through mortal lens—from the
muster of grays above, gaze into a calming stretch of waters;
waders lingering in the river’s reach, & see a boy cleaving
a pathway through loneliness’s vast meadow. & because this flowing
mirror reflects what is, my knees dive to ground as my hands strive
to stop the spillage from my eyes. at my friend’s stepmom newborn’s
naming ceremony, a man yaps about the goodness of boys & the knot
of brothers. & how at their clasp, life melts, like heated ice cubes.
I want to fucking scream—explode into a prolonged syllable of ache
& longing. & say that a desert is trenching my insides, which is to say
that I’ve been harboring a hunger the age of my body. the day shoots
past time & I’m in my home avoiding looking glasses.
Praise Osawaru (he/him) is a writer of Bini descent. A Best of the Net nominee, his work appears or is forthcoming in FIYAH, Frontier Poetry, Down River Road, The Maine Review, Lit Quarterly, and Moonchild Magazine, among others. An NF2W Poetry scholar, he's the second-place winner of the Nigerian NewsDirect Poetry Prize 2020 and a finalist for the 2021 Stephen A. DiBiase Poetry Prize & the 2020 Awele Creative Trust Award. He's a Contributing Editor for Barren Magazine and reader for Chestnut Review. Find him on Instagram & Twitter: @wordsmithpraise.