I am on the shore, pretending to listen to the water\u2019s music
with my lover. there’s no harm in knitting thoughts to comfort<\/p>\n\n\n\n
one\u2019s self from the chill of loneliness. the body can only acco-
mmodate absence so long before it collapses, pillars succumbing
<\/p>\n\n\n\n
to a windstorm. I wish to understand how a body dissolves into
another at the wand of love. how another\u2019s arm becomes a safe<\/p>\n\n\n\n
house one can run into, away from the insanity of living. before quicksand for rock when he set my feet upon the ground.<\/em> dead dark, yet I say everything lost will come alive with the sun<\/em> ask the hen what it dreams of, and it will tell you winging the sky,<\/em> & half-dead, even us. still on the shore, I fall backward onto I pretend I\u2019m not a hollow in the well, a music box Praise Osawaru (he\/him) is a writer of Bini descent. A Best of the Net, Pushcart Prize, and Nina Riggs Poetry Award nominee; his work appears in Agbow\u00f3, FIYAH, Frontier Poetry, Down River Road, The Maine Review, 20.35 Africa, and Uncanny Magazine, among others. He\u2019s the first-place winner of the 2021 Valiant Scribe Poetry Prize. He\u2019s a Contributing Poetry Editor for Barren Magazine and an Associate Prose Editor for Chestnut Review. Find him on Instagram & X @wordsmithpraise.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Praise Osawaru (he\/him) is a writer of Bini descent. A Best of the Net, Pushcart Prize, and Nina Riggs Poetry Award nominee….<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":828,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,5],"tags":[42,9,11,37,48],"class_list":["post-826","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-issue-1","category-poetry","tag-contemporary-nigerian-poets","tag-nigerian-literature","tag-nigerian-poetry","tag-nigerian-literary-magazine","tag-praise-osawaru"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/akpatamag.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/826","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/akpatamag.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/akpatamag.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/akpatamag.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/akpatamag.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=826"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/akpatamag.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/826\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/akpatamag.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=826"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/akpatamag.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=826"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/akpatamag.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=826"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
the day began, a friend texted, saying God must have mistaken <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
him & I are both photographs on the wall in a room<\/p>\n\n\n\n
& he embraces it as a prayer. what hasn\u2019t eluded any of us?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
like a bird.<\/em> this is how we carry on as everything becomes sour<\/p>\n\n\n\n
the sand & caress my shoulders, a plain attempt at relief. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
without a song, a tulip blooming in the meadow of longing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n\n\n\n