Advection

Ukata Edwardson, Nigeria

clouds of rain rumble over the earth, swim the sky toward absence
and my body basks in darkness —the morning of night, like a thing
looking to absorb moisture from everything willing to give, even an
ounce of emotion wet enough to flow. the breeze runs through me
and redresses the temperature of loneliness in my mind. there is
a city where every memory a person leaves undecorated comes to
life, walks on the beach with a nakedness so bleak all the body's tears
travel horizontally to merge with the concomitant horizon, they be-
come a shadow trapped in light—here the grace loses, the grace
finds an emptiness to fall into and sound like a song, a careless song
of transition. the tears become a flower searching for earth, because
all the crisis the mind learns to read is another planet where nothing
grows but death, nothing remembers home like a reverberation, or
a regional sight, nothing tastes like fear and paucity, nothing knows
the grace like a child made of scars. so i decorate all my memories,
every death with a cut, every laughter with a pain —they all don't match,
something is always greater, always moving too fast to be caught
in sorrow, to be called a name and welcomed home, and i don't know it.

U.A Edwardson(they/them) is a queer writer of color from Nigeria, an undergrad at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. They are the second-place winner of the SprinNG Annual Poetry Contest 2021, a semifinalist for the IHRAF Creators Of Justice Awards, with literary content featured or forthcoming on FOLIO, DREICH, Solarpunk, Stick Figure Poetry Quarterly, Sub-saharan, Eboquills, Madness Muse Press, Disquiet Arts, and elsewhere. They won an honourable mention in the Dan Veach Poetry Contest 2021, and tweet occasional personal content @eddiewatson31.