Fall 2025 - Vol. 22, Issue 4

Once, I dreamed my mother was a radio
broadcasting from the belly of the sea
Each wave was a frequency of grief
and I tuned in with my bones

When I woke, my hands were covered in static
small ghosts of touch
echoes of things that never happened
but still hurt when I breathed

I walk through the city like a translation error,
half-remembered,
a phrase that lost its verb
Even my name pops differently in the mouths of others

They say the body forgets
but I’ve seen it replay old wars behind my ribs
rewrite a lullaby into an elegy
call it survival

What is memory but a room
we keep breaking to fit our dreams inside?
Every time I reach
a new door opens where a wall used to be

When I was nine, I learned that ghosts keep different time
They knock between seconds
show up as a wisp of chill in air conditioner
a shadow that forgets to follow

Mama said if you listen right
you can hear prayer inside electricity
So I spent summers pressed against the socket
trying to catch the voices mid-transmission.

Sometimes it was her mother speaking Yoruba
through the buzz, asking why we stopped lighting candles.
Other times it was silence
which I mistook for forgiveness

The first time I braided my own hair
I felt someone else’s patience in my fingers
The rhythm didn’t belong to me
but the ache did

Years later, in a borrowed apartment
I dreamed of rivers running through power lines
Oshun stood barefoot in the current
her laughter static and gold

When I woke, the lights had gone out
I sat there in almost-morning,
feeling every ancestor lean close
waiting to see if I would speak

Last night the moon unbuttoned its skin
and stepped into my room,
smelling of rain

and burnt sugar

It said my name in three tenses
past, future, and what-never-happened
then asked why I kept burying my shadow
in other people’s light

Outside, the streetlamps whispered like deacons
calling down thunder
Every house leaned in
listening for its own confession

I opened my mouth and bees came out
They carried pieces of my voice
to the river behind the world
where forgotten songs go to bloom

There, my grandmother was stirring the water
with a silver spoon,
singing something older than breath
Each note turned into a door

I stepped through one
and found myself back in my own body
a small, flickering church
where every wound was a window
and every window, a hymn

I woke to the sound of water remembering my name
It spoke not in words but in breath
a rhythm older than mourning
older than language itself

In the mirror, my reflection was still asleep
Her eyelids trembled like wings
waiting for a signal
I cupped her face and whispered, come back gently

Outside, the city was bowed in prayer
streetlights flickering psalms to no one in particular
the wind moving through alleyways
like incense through a chapel

I thought of my grandmother’s hands
how they smelled of salt and ash
how every line on her palm
was a map to somewhere we’ve already been

And when the first light touched my skin
I felt every ancestor lean close
their silence vast and merciful
as if the day itself were offering forgiveness

for all the ghosts I refused to carry.