by Joseph Omoh Nduwku
There is nothing to the darkness, nothing in it, really,
only the mist of our breathing and the candid shape
of our collective depression. The dog under the table
dreams something a little more definitive. A seraphic
charge of the centaur through the universal hum,
like the quick blink of a cat’s eye in the dark.
I rise in a city I love on an unremarkable morning,
the red roofs being what they are: red roofs, and all of time
barren under the haze as I mark off the ticker of time
with photographs—a purple triangle, a flag raised
on Iwo Jima, the crumpled currencies of a short-lived
nation in West Africa, a lady and her dog— all of us marching
forward, dispiritedly, in the cosmic dust of God’s voice,
wanting nothing other than to sit but finding that we can’t.
Joseph Omoh Ndukwu is a writer, editor, and art critic. His work has appeared in Guernica, Prairie Schooner, Off Assignment, Transition, and elsewhere. In 2021, he was selected for the Momus Emerging Critics Residency, and in 2022, he won the Virginia Faulkner Award for Excellence in Writing. He lives in Ibadan, Nigeria.