THE FIRST TIME I SAW A GHOST
As a child, I saw a ghost without knowing it
was the past come present, martyred footsteps drawn
into the earth. My verbs staggered to make tense
out of the anachronism, but a spit-ful prayer escaped
instead
as bad breath and decay. Even now, some visions
make my hands tremble, attempting another séance
with a God still perfecting his acts. In the occasion
of a biased inquisition, all my fears are hung to dangle
at the edge
of incomplete sentences, like ellipses. The earth shifts
away from her sockets, searching for a moon that surrenders
before it becomes an imago. By dawn, there’s no room
for two. The sky shrinks & I wonder if treasures make it
to the afterlife too.
BLUE GHOST
My memory of you lies somewhere between valley & hill,
jaded joules, weary of the tyranny of perpetual ascent.
Drowning is easier when messiah lies at rock bottom
of a glass, delaying the rapture of recollection; words
too fond of waiting in ink never really materialize as URLs.
They escape into the mist, somewhere between clouds
and dust, beyond the firm grip of remembrance; history
knocks but no one answers the call to prayer at dusk.
Xaron Ire is a non-binary writer, currently schooling at the University of Ibadan, Nigeria. They and their works have been featured in Brittle Paper, Rust + Moth, The Mark Literary Review, and Nigeria’s first LGBT+ magazine — A Nasty Boy. They write from Ibadan.
Beautiful! “BLUE GHOST” strikes me as a lamentation of fated forgettableness, an pessimistic plea to your hands make your mark by saying the words you wish.”