Time travel exists

Abdulrazaq Salihu, Nigeria 

In space,

A lot of things don’t age.

Scouring sounds from the void

Let the asteroid decide their paths.

We leave earth on a spaceship,

Twice the size of broken stardust

Always from the quiet arena,

So the entire earth doesn’t shake—

So there is nothing affecting the time loop.

On our way home, there is a small deviation

In the expected orbit of stars near Sagittarius A*,

There is an organic, undulating, animalistic sound

Definitely of the environment cutting through time.

My brother exercised this long to be thin enough

To survive the wormhole, I remind him how time doesn’t

Literally bend, he tells me how massive objects could

Modify their spatial component and the proper time interval

Around them to travel at light speed and stop time so our mother

Doesn’t have to die— doesn’t have to witness the apocalypse

Eating up sarkin pawa, eating up Kayes and Liberia.

Time has not moved forward in years,

That is to say, we might have survived

Instead, my brother keeps mouthing the swollen prayers,

Packing the void, slowly, into eternalism, and nothing has changed.

The apocalypse

The final destruction my father misinterpreted

Was acted perfectly in my brother’s school play

And thank goodness for my phone recorder.

On our way home,

The recording leaked into reality.

My aunt in Texas called to remind

Me of verse 51 & 51 of suratul Al-qalam.

I peeped through the windscreen

And buses and the people they conveyed

Looked exquisite as terror:

Young boys were conquering

As much as the war was,

Shoulder blades aligned in the masjid

Between the famine and the deaths.

As we alighted the car, with love,

Between my trembling feet and the mantra,

I worried my neck to pronounce hawa as love

Between my mother’s sadness.

I wanted to know where the stress lay.

I wanted to know how it felt to carry a

Sad vision home.

I wondered how many words my father misinterpreted,

Knowingly and unknowingly.

And how many verses I still had time to recite.

*time has not moved forward in years is a borrowed line from Lorrie Ness’ poem, refuge.

Abdulrazaq Salihu, X-gene is a Nigerian award-winning poet. He has his works published/forthcoming in Brittle Paper, Masks lit mag, Kalahari review, Pine Cone review, Rogue, and elsewhere. He won the masks lit mag poetry award, BPKW poetry contest, Nigerian prize for teen authors, splendors of Dawn poetry contest, and more. He is a member of the Hilltop Creative Arts Foundation and has been living for too long inside his head.