Devotion
I
Take a good look!
Two albatrosses in a sea-circled expanse.
Other wilds would be who reach out
to part ways like land severed by an ocean rift.
They would gut little things that revolt into life
to explore a little little more.
But not these ones;
not the strain for a home-making
dotting the sun with stalactites.
They have the sense of devotion—
Hermes reconditioning his wife
with wine of affection
in a firefly eye of a clam.
Look! Look! Look! The dance
of these albatrosses in a sea, heaviness
like the iceberg of a frozen era!
II
Dear Nguevese,
Stories of men who harvest souls
with dripping heartbreak begin like this:
My pulse falters at your sight—Angel
of magical things that deities emulate.
Let the slap of our bodies, like
clapping hands, mutter divine mystery
which no word can utter.
But ours refuses a trodden path.
I will not mention love—a fire sniffing for a river
to drench and douse a burning body.
I start at the end
of Anna Karenina you licked from my lips
for the softness of the future
casting frost wine into a blue moon.
Let the leeward flight of these love-birds
loop us in palindromic tangles
beyond the silver crown of the sky
where God, from his infinite loneliness,
envies your joyful pain.
✶✶✶✶
Ude Ogbodo Okereke is a human rights activist, poet, and philosopher. He wishes that art, somehow, could become an instrument of change. His works have appeared in Brittle Paper and elsewhere. When he catches a pause from reading and arguing, he moans his country.
✶
Michael Singh is an interdisciplinary artist originally from Southern California. He works across painting, printmaking, illustration, and collage. He taught drawing and painting in Los Angeles before relocating to New York in 2017. In 2021 he briefly studied painting at The New York Art Students League and The 92nd Street Y. He now works and resides in upstate New York.
✶
Another Chicago Magazine 