Akanni Festus Olaniyi

Longlisted Poem: “There’s a Blackhole Somewhere in My Body”

There’s a Black Hole Somewhere in My Body

When I was but a blind poet groping, 

searching for the edge of the universe, 

I found my body—

an accidental discovery. 

Here’s the matter; my body, is also in search of a poem for it. 

My body, is a map of the universe. 

The universe’s history is abridged and packed 

into my irides—two galaxies of their own. 

Starlight of decay washes me of pain and guilt; 

the blessings of decay and forgetting. 

I don’t know what the universe seeks redemption from, 

but it bloats endlessly. 

My body, sometimes doesn’t heal, 

but hides sores like the space once occupied by fallen stars. 

Sores that percolate deep into layers and strata unreachable. 

My body, rehearses to itself again and again 

how to turn insensate. Till it is half-convinced. 

I have written other bodies into poems, 

those bodies that I think occupy a role-place in history. 

I wonder if I do too; I’m yet to write my body into form. 

Every time I forget how it feels to possess a form. 

A form with a particular role in history—no matter how minute, 

something reminds me of the black hole in my body 

sucking away things from my reach. 

My footprints, like those of countless others before me, await 

erasure by soft crashes of the lapping waves of time. 

Time, they say, has wings too. And is impatient