Photo Credit: Etsy.com
Mercy, mercy
after Michael Imossan
Somewhere in Ikorodu,
violence is loosening its fists,
thawing like ice in the chest of a tout.
he drowns a bus driver in baptismal curses
with names of different gods.
a market woman spits on a customer shaving prices
like hair down to the scalp.
meaning slips & collapses between a Hausa bike man
& the passenger behind him. this is to say
everything is crawling towards confusion like vines.
i am standing in front of the lips of the market, observing.
a boy on dreadlocks and baggy trousers is being
circled by men with stuffed mouths full of eulogies.
in his front, a child in stinking clothes
offers nothing but the stretch of a bowl.
mercy is a lost metaphor here: in the pocket
of the guy who doesn’t carry notes for boys
who smell like hunger.
Contributor’s Bio
Saheed Sunday, NGP V, is a Nigerian poet, a Star Prize awardee, a Pushcart nominee, a Best of the Net nominee, Best Small Fictions nominee, an HCAF member, and a poetry reader at Chestnut Review. He has been published in Palette Poetry, Strange Horizons, Lucent Dreaming, North Dakota Quarterly, etc.
