Many things travel faster than light—set the brain of a heartbroken girl in motion and watch how it travels to places she has not been. Darkness has rays it passes through opaque objects—like my mother when beams of joy diverged from her body into spaces she cannot reach. My mother is a non-luminous object—her body is a thick night that swallows the moon/firefly/and stars into nonexistence. This is to say that she has far forgotten how to laugh, how to paint her body to a rainbow or make her body luminous like— the sun greeting the earth at noon. I am here travelling with joy in parallel. when I incident on a mirror, I do not locate my image but grieving shadow. I am good at tracing my body in the mirror, I learned it from my mother who traces for what she becomes when my father becomes rays converging into her eyes—that
no matter how she tries to propagate it, she
falls into tears. so what I have become is not as a result of error due to parallax— I am a broken image hard to gather into a whole. My physics teacher failed to tell us that the fragility of humans increases as they grow. I experiment with my body every day and the result is always positive. This is to say that life eats up our strength till everything we touch breaks us.
Philip Chijioke Abonyi is a 26-year-old writer, cosmetician, and student of Federal polytecnic Oko, Anambra state. He lives on the hill of Nigeria where the sun rises. He was shortlisted for Eriata Oribhabor Poetry Prize, 2018. His work has appeared in African writer’s magazines, AceWorld, Eve magazine, qwenu, Allpoetry, Tushstories, spriNG, Praxis magazine, Poetry potion, Nantygreens, and elsewhere.