a dead body shapeshift into a cyborg to look for his lost body with these details:
facial appearance; a black face snowing with flickery smile.
country; a place where oceans swell from music of blackness peeling its skin.
last seen; anyone that understood the language of the dead—not a sheep.
ten seconds: in the binary of a computer, he swears that his stomach—
a then gateway of termites, earth, ants, fireflies—
is in a nonstop tubing with droplets
of stars dr(owning) night.
twenty seconds: of scratching the street for list of bodies
that skyrocketed to a planet of red sea,
earth erupted & an aorta, emptied
on the hymn of the cloud,
note: centrifuge at rpm of the year you died
for five seconds (if you remembered)
to collect your blood.
which means, if nothing, if nobody, if nearby,
a body must fasten its memory to B-cells when dying.
thirty seconds: the battery is failing, too, & the guns are still thirsty.
forty seconds: battery status: 15%
warning: farewell in 20 seconds.
a janazah prayer dropped before zuhr,
another body with no metaphor of life
hanging, sang in the radio.
fifty seconds: at the graveyard’s teeth, with a scalpel,
he picked the debris of the passengers,
smeared onto a slide, then, mounted
on the floor of a microscope.
result: bones out of marrow, sighted.
sixty seconds: to cyborg deactivation, he said
]
my body isn’t here
it escaped to where home
is not the mouth of fire.
]
Zaynab Bobi, Frontier I, is a Nigerian-Hausa poet, digital artist, and photographer from Bobi. She is studying Medical Laboratory Science at Usmanu Danfodiyo University Sokoto. Her works have appeared in Strange Horizons, FIYAH Magazine, Native Skin, Lucent Dreaming, Agbowó, Omenana Magazine, MaskLit, Anomaly, Night Coffee Lit, and elsewhere. She is the winner of the Gimba Suleiman Hassan Gimba ESQ Poetry Prize 2022, a Pushcart Prize nominee, a BoTN nominee and recently joined Visual Verse as an intern assistant editor. She tweets @ZainabBobi.
