Title: My Twitter keeps feeding me crumbs of a distant war.

At times I wonder,
Who will tell you the news of my death—Hamid Mosadegh.

The blueness of space.
A video pops up like a portal
and pulls me in. Inside, iron birds

shit bombs that make the earth
unsure of itself. Dust and smoke
cataracts the sun and the sky is a broken

chandelier. There are faceless voices
and screams fluttering about, searching
for bodies to nest in and call home.

Then there is a Ukrainian soldier, his cheeks
and nose pink against the translucent snow.
He recites an old Persian poem in Farsi

and I wonder how brave one must be
to wear a tongue that isn’t his in the
mouth of a crocodile. In the poem,

another soldier is wondering how his
beloved would find out about his death.
How she, a tired old oak, would just shrug,

unsurprised by the snap of the crocodile’s jaw.
Little boys are taught that it is glory
for a dove to fly beak-first into the

death dance of a tornado, taught that
it is their duty to break the spinning
poltergeist spine, taught to pluck their

feathers and fill it’s pores with
spittle from the mouths of other men.
Men are taught to be men and Walahi

It will be the end of us. The doves fight
the wars of the vultures and the aftermath
is an empty seat at a mother’s dinner table

Title: A boy, a body, a bullet, a bird.

In my life I have been many things,
A body yearning for a sepulchre to die in,
A bird eating up the sky,
A bullet shifting through time and space,
Searching for a crevasse to lodge itself in
And spread like an infection
Or shatter into a litany of joys and sorrows.
Do not worry, this isn’t another knock on grief’s door.
No, this is a man with a flashlight
searching for the bone in his stomach.
In my life, I have been many things,
A boy hoping to taste air.

About The Author:

Godwin Adah is a Nigerian writer. He is a recent finalist for the Awele Creative Trust Award and was longlisted for the Afritondo Short Story Prize (2022). You can find him on Twitter and Instagram @goddy_adah

*Featured image by Hans from Pixabay