After the country had slept, I allowed my eyes unfurl to watch the soft feathery palms of the sun
open to gather night into its mouth. The stars disappearing into a song that holds no breath but
silence. The day is bleak with the colour of remembering; how a bleeding rainbow snuggled
under the wings of a scrawny bird for safety. memory is a bastard: what I mean is, it has no
father to teach it the courtesy of knocking before entering. I am standing beside mama’s eyes,
sifting your dead body from her brows. She is telling me a story; of times when father’s poured
their shadows into enamel cups before darkness could burn it away; of a sea that once mourned
the loss of a body it could not swallow. There are no dreams here, no songs/ just the noise from
our neighbour’s generator prancing the nude darkness in our home. The carbon fumes choking
the neck of country’s hope—and there is no light —and there is no light —and the refrigerator
isn’t cold enough to preserve our fresh                          tomorrow. From the balcony, I watch
lizards frolic over moss covered fences, the sky clad in broken crystals cast its shimmering ray
upon clouds learning the smell of formaldehyde like cotton wools in mortuaries. Mama wrings
water from her cloth, wrings the last drop of hope left in her vein and strings them over the naked
wire sloping into our compound from the pole obeying yesterday’s wind.

“Nepa!” The little boy from our neighbour’s room yells.