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Vol. 1:  On Isolation

Timi Sanni

How a Boy
Becomes Undone

poem by Timi Sanni

like a loose knot / carrying his father’s words

like a gust of wind / between unfolding fists:

son, bodies do not run / from bodies.

Here, in Houdini’s temple/ where the shadow

of my lover / is the emptiness / of a hollow,

I learn / that distance between two bodies /

is an elegy / to the death that lives / within shards

of a fractured heart / that a foreign touch / is a miracle

when your world / is a six-foot cage / holding the darkness

of a metal grave. I once owned a bird / which

carried its broken wings/ like questions marks/ asking:

If a distant love / cannot take two names, is absence loss /

or longing? & How do you name a child born /

of silence? I become undone / like a woman

back stepping / into her past, searching /

for eluding shapes / in the shadow of a memory.

Half Lights

half light.

a lonely silhouette lies

within the four walls of this house

of unbecoming, where my shadow calls

to the sun in the voice of an echo, in the name

of Papa. I once heard father say,

that the absence of bodies

            is only a poverty of the flesh,

                          so in the making of solitude,

I fork into crossroads of thoughts, praying

to become a melody, to become a petal

but the night drapes me in darkness & I

become an empty body / a lone star

giving wrong coordinates

in my delirium.

Half Lights and Empty Bodies

poem by Timi Sanni

Timi Sanni is a Nigerian writer and literary enthusiast studying Biochemistry at Lagos State University, Nigeria. His works have appeared or are forthcoming in Radical Art Review, Writers Space Africa, Ethel Zine, Cypress, Rather Quiet and elsewhere. He recently won the SprinNG Poetry Contest and is the recipient of the Fitrah Review Prize for Fiction 2020.When not writing or studying, he is either painting or exploring new places. He is an editor for Kalopsia lit.

Twitter: @timisanni

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