Walrus

In response to Francisca Bell’s ‘Love in the Time of COVID-19’

An explosion off the crest
of a distant highland ─
and a flight of pigeons
migrating swiftly into a fist
of clouds overhead, to safety ─
is how I learn to love
in the time of mourning.
I read Baldwin’s rugged
letters in the noonday sun
stopping time after time,
to clutch
an uncorked silver can of
grey goose vodka
like an archipelago
of my own thoughts. Sheltered
under an aging maple tree
in a sun-burnt garden,
I pretend its slippery trunk
is my lover’s body, bare
and fallow. I pretend
we’re two walruses
learning a new act of
remote loving.
I take swigs of rum,
shut my eyes
to the fire surging through
the firs of my throat
for this is the taste of
displacement in the time
of a great pandemic.
And when the longing
becomes a river
that threatens to consume
my shipwrecked body.
I whisper in lieu of supplications
to a river god I barely know,
to spare us one more round
of loving;
a chain of words escape
my mouth’s hollowness,
in tendrils of red moist
twinkling lights
like cries strung together.

Chisom Okafor is a Nigerian poet, who has worked as a nutritionist, dietitian, bartender, accountant and night auditor. He was shortlisted for the Brittle Paper Award for Poetry in 2018 and the Gerald Kraak Prize in 2019. His work appears in the Indian Journal of Literature and Aesthetics, Prairie Schooner, Rattle, Palette Poetry, Frontier Poetry, SAND Journal, 2019 Gerald Kraak Anthology, The Rising Phoenix Review, Kikwetu Journal, and elsewhere. He presently works as Chapbook Editor for the Libretto Chapbook Series.