Osieka Osinimu Alao

Flowering Bones

This world, a wheel of flowering bones:
This world, a wheel of flowers and bones.
Nothing sleeps here, which means every
dream has a cadence of hitting a shooting
star to set off a galactic firework. When we
were kids, we were taught to fire without
fear, to send the arrow spiralling into the
iris of the sun. This world, to shed, and
shed into labyrinth of phantom: This world,
to sprawl into seraphim of photon. Nothing
sleeps here, which means everything is
a wheel, out of a dream or into a dream.
This world, a sky lantern at the end of
all mis-beginnings: This world, a snake
of roads into a dream out of another dream.
Pray a seizure out of all slithering soles.
Pray a cynosure into all splintering souls.
Rule one: don’t melt mid-mile, or be frozen
by a road of snakes. Somewhere, there’re
red petals, elsewhere, graves of red petals.
And there’s you, a grave and a red petal.

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Osieka Osinimu Alao is a Nigerian writer, poet, editor and academic. He holds an MA in Creative Writing from Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge. He was shortlisted for the Albert Jungers Poetry Prize 2022, First Prize Winner BPPC Soro Soke Edition 2022 and a winner in the Creators of Justice Literary Award 2022.  His works are featured or forthcoming in ANMLY, Ta Adesa, African Writer Magazine, Rigorous, International Human Rights Art Movement, Kalahari Review, Lumiere Review and elsewhere. He is @OOAlao_ on Twitter & Instagram.