To Bounce
- Jan 26, 2024
- 1 min read
by Olumide Manuel
means to trampoline. means to lit a bloom between the fangs of griefs. means to change direction after hitting an obstacle. I remember my father cracking jokes in the poorly lit room where his mother laid dead. people laughed then fell to silence. people fall and remain capable of joy. it is a reckoning. the same sky of hailstorm is the same sky of sunlight. sometimes, our trauma forgets to wear us. It doesn’t make it less of a skin. but it is this strength, this elastic grace, that saddens me at times, to look at a grief so rightly sharp, and know that one day I will have to mourn that sharpness.
Olumide Manuel, NGP IX, is a writer, a biology teacher and an environmentalist. He is a nominee of Pushcart Prize, and the winner of Aké Climate Change Poetry Prize 2022. His chapbook, Hopemonger, won the Nigerian NewsDirect Chapbook Award 2022. His works have been published on Magma Poetry, trampset, Uncanny Magazine, Agbowó Magazine, Up The Staircase Quarterly, Frontier Poetry, and elsewhere.
