Image by Enrique Meseguer from Pixabay
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 GHOSTMy 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.