Need for Speed
- Jun 30, 2021
- 2 min read
by Ernest O. Ògúnyẹmí
I want my life to mean beauty, for the lilacs to bloom & for summer to make its music, its manic magic of beleaguered birds. I stand in the light, pretend this once I am golden, a star, boy in a movie of cowries & coins. I want the river to bleed into the wound & for the wound to bleed into the river. I want God’s nose for breakfast, his toes fried, snack for the hours before noon when I’ll have his testicles, peppered. fear not, the Lord will grow new balls. purple this time. or maybe brown or black. I want yesterdays & I do not want them. longing is funny that way. I smoke, lock myself up in rooms of songs. wooden saxophones. trumpeting pianos. & I go to those places where nostalgia pulls me. it is in the fire that the body learns its language — the broken piano dancing on the river’s shoulder, the salt tabernacle of severed dreams. sallow sorrow. peacock shoes. pretend again, this time let the divination betray the broth, the heavy banana tray the parted bowls of dusk. the point is what do you see, when the mirror appears behind the door of your doom -light. what do you hear, when the cowry chains begin to dangle, the masks with their roboto mouths shapeshifting. where do you want to go, when the train of Dream Deers appears. I want to beauty.
Ernest O. Ògúnyẹmí is a writer and editor from Nigeria. His works have recently appeared/ are forthcoming in AGNI, Joyland, No Tokens, Agbowó, Southern Humanities Review, the Minnesota Review, the McNeese Review, West Trade Review, among other places. He is a staff writer at Open Country Mag.
