JOSEPH by Michael Imossan (Day 24 of KSR 31 Days of Poetry)

At the beach, the waves froth over the white sands.
A black man sits beside me,
swaying palm trees dyed over his vintage
shirt, tells me he loves when his white
girlfriend calls him Nigga. I do not tell him
how disgusted I feel. How I want to call him
a sellout. I bottle my disdain.

A dolphin dives out of
the water and I learn
that desire rides the body like a horse.

That love runs on the tongue as language does.
As fire sweeping through a pastured farm. Three years
later, I am in room with my girlfriend.

My anger flung over the air like a winged
discus. She lets the word kafir slip out of
her mouth like chill breeze through a half-closed
window. Her eyes lit with remorse. Her caramel-tinged
body glinting over the walls. I smile,
scoop her face into my palm and press a kiss
on her forehead. This is it: in love everything
is magic. A word potent of starving
3 million children can be folded into a lighthouse.

She wrings herself inside my body, Michael! Harna! I
want to love a taboo, I want a taboo to love me. We know
we won’t last, the world might welcome us with arrows. But in
that moment, she surrenders herself to me like a woman
in orgasm—we both lean into the beauty of dreams
and the stars begin to bow.

Michael Imossan is a Nigerian poet currently studying for a master’s in Linguistics at Usmanu Danfodiyo, Sokoto. He won the Radical Arts Review poetry contest (2022) and the Nigerian Newsdirect Chapbook Series competition (2022) with his title, For the Love of Coutry and Memory. He was a finalist for the Lumiere Review Poetry Prize (2022), an honourable mention for the DIBiase Poetry Prize (2022) and best of the net nominee (2022). He has been longlisted for the Unserious Collective Fellowship (2022) and the Nigerian Newsdirect Poetry Prize (2020). He has been interviewed by The Daily Trust Newspaper (2020). His works are forthcoming from; Brittle Paper, Frontier Poetry, Strange Horizon. SEVHAGE Reviews and elsewhere. Michael Imossan is on Twitter as @michael_imossan