I am on the shore, pretending to listen to the water’s music
with my lover. there’s no harm in knitting thoughts to comfort

one’s self from the chill of loneliness. the body can only acco-
mmodate absence so long before it collapses, pillars succumbing

to a windstorm. I wish to understand how a body dissolves into
another at the wand of love. how another’s arm becomes a safe

house one can run into, away from the insanity of living. before
the day began, a friend texted, saying God must have mistaken 

quicksand for rock when he set my feet upon the ground. 
him & I are both photographs on the wall in a room

dead dark, yet I say everything lost will come alive with the sun
& he embraces it as a prayer. what hasn’t eluded any of us?

ask the hen what it dreams of, and it will tell you winging the sky,
like a bird. this is how we carry on as everything becomes sour

& half-dead, even us. still on the shore, I fall backward onto 
the sand & caress my shoulders, a plain attempt at relief. 

I pretend I’m not a hollow in the well, a music box
without a song, a tulip blooming in the meadow of longing.

Praise Osawaru (he/him) is a writer of Bini descent. A Best of the Net, Pushcart Prize, and Nina Riggs Poetry Award nominee; his work appears in Agbowó, FIYAH, Frontier Poetry, Down River Road, The Maine Review, 20.35 Africa, and Uncanny Magazine, among others. He’s the first-place winner of the 2021 Valiant Scribe Poetry Prize. He’s a Contributing Poetry Editor for Barren Magazine and an Associate Prose Editor for Chestnut Review. Find him on Instagram & X @wordsmithpraise.