SURVIVAL

By Ugochukwu Damian Okpara
Originally Published in Cyber Smut (Guts Publishing, London 2020)

Stress warning: The following contains material relating to mental health struggles and trauma in no particular order, which may be triggering to victims and survivors

• in the club, you danced like fire, spilled your grief like gin, while i, in a room knotted my body into all rigid things to becloud my thirst for men.

 

• fear knows how best to sit in a room, knows how to shrink until it ripples into your body.

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• you danced & flickered like candlelight, tried so hard not to lean into a boy’s arms & mourn all the things eating queer boys up.​

• you tried hard, because you could be another chijioke, whose bones now serve as maps to dead queer boys whose last prayers were ashes falling on burning tongues. or another ifediuto, gulped whole by disease, whose bones outlived his flesh on his dying bed devoid of the smell of antiseptics. how could he tell where drowning began? or me, who misread a blackmailer’s lips for a lover’s.

• ​see, i am still shrinking while my nudes spread like pox on my facebook timeline.

• you did not cuddle my sadness with me.

• instead, you left to live in a club, because each time we see the morning sun sneak into our rooms like riflers, we bless the universe, for we now, are a miracle, a survived lynch.

• but there you were dancing like it was your last night.

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• still, i know you were yearning to live, the way your eyes failed to gaze at the waist of boys twisting into a hunger you wanted to fill with your mouth.