REVERSE EVALUATION > POETRY
living in another country.
Someplace certain in its utopia,
a veritable Eden on earth.
My present life is rot
and other catastrophes.
Feed the beast and hope it spares you.
No one really walks around here
with their noses open, the air
is a fine mist of death.
Our leaders’ palms are not yellow trumpets—
they touch my heart with dark smoke,
tell me to smile.
My local government’s Chairman
lives abroad, perhaps I will
do the same in another lifetime.
And what is there to stay for?
Bad roads, terrorists, corruption,
Nigerian men gathering online, applauding rape,
we can all run away till there is
no country left. The map,
failing to remember my name.
The anthem, humming itself
in mourning.
In that new homeland,
I am not thinking whether my brother
will return from a protest
with wounds that mean something
or as a bullet’s kind gesture,
how deep my sister’s body rests
in a story no one tells.
Thereafter, our family is rich—
that past life of rationed joy,
an everyday apocalypse,
unfolds into continuous festivity.
I will be a happy poet
writing happy poems;
how fortuitous, how un-Nigerian of me.
Hassan A. Usman (he/him), NGP II, a person living with Haemophilia, is a graduate of Counselling Education at the University of Ilorin. His works have appeared or are forthcoming in ANMLY, Ake Review, Sand Journal, Electric Literature, Consequence Forum, Blue Route Journal, Blue Marble Review, Isele Magazine, The Shallow Tales Review, Lunaris Review, Paper Lanterns, Trampset, Poetrycolumn-NND, and elsewhere. He’s an alumnus of the SprinNG Writing Fellowship 2022. Hassan enjoys cooking, listening to Afrobeats and Heartbreak Pop, and models part-time. He tweets @hassanthemodel