I touch the earth and find the ash of my mother’s hair, her breath curling into smoke, into a hymn she will never sing. The fire eats through my hands as if it knows my name as if it has waited for this moment to make a feast of my body. Everywhere I go, the animals keep my secrets. The birds stitch my grief into their wings, carrying pieces of what I can no longer hold. The snakes coil my sorrow underground, burying what I’ve begged to forget. Last night, the moon burned itself into the river, and I was there to watch it drown. Everything goes this way: the air, the body, the prayer we refuse to finish. The water cannot spit me out. It holds me as it holds the ghost of rain, turning my name into something heavy, something that sinks. I asked the water to name me, but all it gave back was silence, its voice caught in the belly of a fish long dead, long forgiven. The fire grows a mouth, and it sings my body into a psalm of smoke. I am nothing but what I’ve lost: a garden of teeth and a heart beating against the blackened wood. To live is to be buried in parts, to call each death by a different name. Here is the fire. Here is the water. Here, where the earth learns how to swallow me whole. This is what I know of living: the birds mourn another loss, the snakes keep their prayers, and the river, even in its rage, cradles me like something it forgot to destroy. 

Oladosu Michael Emerald is the author of Every Little Thing That Moves and the art editor at Surging Tide. He is a digital/musical/visual artist, an actor, a photographer, and an athlete. He teaches art at the Arnheim Art Gallery to kids and adults, is an Art Instructor at the Anasa Collection Art Gallery and a volunteer art instructor at Status Dignus Child Rescue Home and Ibeere Otun Initiative, as well as a Pioneer Fellow of the Muktar Aliyu Art Residency. He is winner of the GPC poetry contest and the Spring contest, and second-runner-up in the Fireflies poetry contest. He tweets @garricologist and @garrycologist on Instagram.

Header photograph and artwork by Jordan Keller-Wilson