i
In a bar where each man is a dreamer,
my lover keeps Freddie Mercury in time,
eyes fixed on the space that harbours the magic in his mouth.
Here, where the blood in my father’s eyes nor the whip in his hands
are unable to put out the glow on my face, the barista points
out his Cocktail Special for the night, cups his hands
round my earlobe to drown out the noise.

ii
Initial market prices, he tells me, are seldom the real ones,
but here our firsts are real and our word is gospel.
I want to repeat these words to my lover
while I watch him lip-sync, lost to the stereo beats:
my arms round your neck are real and my love is gospel.
But this is only an alternate world and he sits at the other end of the table,
his eyes trained on boys whose hips swing to a kind of magic, whose other names are
synonyms for fire and blood and all things etched on stone.

iii
On the day I tell my father about this lover hiding in my head,
he says ‘never offend the city that raised you’
an old coat of paint half peels from the wall behind him
in dire need of a retouch, like all things about this city, aflame in my mouth.
I start to eat the ruins that my body has become at noon; leftover basmati rice,
all the while, searching for god in my father’s burning eyes,
unraveling instead, a mystery room for difficult transactions.

iv
Sometimes, I want to say: my body is a summation
of intricate angles ─ hypotenuses ─ in a city of Pythagorean triangles.
I want to offer myself to the warmth in my lover’s skin.
I want to say: sup on my tears.
Make a cocktail recipe out of me and call it yours.
Teach me to decipher dreams that are mine to interpret,
how to find home in the starlit din of nightclubs
where twinkling lights are hardly always what they seem.

Chisom Okafor, Poet and Nutritionist, was shortlisted for the Brittle Paper Award for Poetry in 2018 and the Gerald Kraak Prize of 2019. His works have been published or are forthcoming in Praire Schooner, the Indian Journal of Literature and Aesthetics, Rattle, Palette Poetry, The 2019 Gerald Kraak Anthology (The Heart of the Matter), Kikwetu, The Rising Phoenix Review, The Single Story Foundation Journal, Praxis, Sentinel Literary Quarterly, Brittle Paper and elsewhere. He is currently co-editing 20:35 Africa, an anthology of contemporary poetry.