Dandelions
before the war crumbles a girl receives / an invasion / the apex of a bullet / redefining her lineage / hurried showers / blinking red lights / that highlight everything but danger / everyone but the dead / the boys orphaned by bullets and bullet-points / how wailing sirens are also a mother’s forlorn cry / streets marked by the footprints of war / and in these streets we pass bubble gums between fleeting hugs / kiss a neighbor’s cheeks and pray survival / speak life to the sorrow sprouting petals from
*
a garden / we lay the bodies by the flowerbeds / youngest to oldest / and in this way a father is joined to his bride even in sleep / death futile in parting these ones / the irony of death as victor and vanquished / cradle the nimble fingers of the girl who grows to learn that her parents / {because the war claimed a dozen in her lineage and ignored her, & only a poem can account for this pun, how survival aggrieves the body that dodges the bullet} / did not receive
*
a funeral / instead were wrapped in red satin / like shawarma fillings dressed in pita / and imagine the uncanny affair between wounded bodies and slain lambs / how beef can be a metaphor for body / and isn’t / because a lamb can be cultured towards an inevitable slaughter but who nurses a child towards demise / who except the bullet / but the bullet knows nothing about names or places / has no preferences for gender / adds nothing to a body but
*
a metaphor / so the girl learns the metaphor for nightmares / the variants of grief / learns to shelter loss into her fragile limbs / spry fingers taught the methodology of escape / learns to wrestle the constitution for misnaming her lineage / the media for misquoting her story / wears a scar for every wounded girl in Maiduguri / in Plateau, Kabul, Kigali, Gaza / the headline of ghoulish reports / the girl offered
*
a baptism / a beloved opportunity to rewrite her history / in Lagos or London or Los Angeles or Perth / how she becomes an element / learns to sniff grief before it matures / to modify her journey at the emergence of every bullet / flee into the silhouette of the garden hosting her mother’s perfume
*
and here she beholds the blooming dandelions / bright yellow florets beneath a cascade of sunrays / here she relearns the beauty song / her magnificent, rapturous being / watches sunset tease the garden’s brinks / till she can embrace the unkindness of absence without withering / without falling headfirst into ordeals about wars / say bullets. / till the midnight ululations echo the lullabies of her infant years.