Tolu Ogunlesi

Harbinger

There are icicles that form on the surface of oceans, translucent teeth putting roots down in the submerged mouth of God. There is ice—forbidding, jagged, sentient—that can form inside the human soul because we are sixty or seventy percent water. There is the ice-breaker in which we all acknowledge, no exceptions, that dead ships can request living sailors. That the hunger of water is insatiable, its roiling surfaces and pleasurized depths always in competition. That, under great pressure, dreams can liquefy. That water truly has no enemy. That even a wreck, falling to bits, is allowed to unfurl its ghostly sail across many generations. That this particular body of water loyally waits on those for whom the journey’s a lifelong dream. That another world lies out there, another set of strivers, drawn to water, allergic to attention. For these ones, pirouetting through water is tragedy, not a harbinger of hydrodynamics, their fleet of pirogues a parade of rotting wooden teeth, to be spat out of the submerged mouth of God.

Tolu Ogunlesi’s fiction and poetry have appeared or are forthcoming in Wasafiri, World Literature Today, Sable, Magma, Orbis, Ad Fontes, Michigan Quarterly Review, Nine Muses Review, and others. He’s the winner of a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize, a PEN/Studzinski Literary Award, and an Honorable Mention in the 2006 Concorso internazionale di poesia Castello di Duino. He was shortlisted for a 2023 Miles Morland Writing Scholarship. He has been awarded writing/research fellowships by the Nordic Africa Institute (NAI), Sweden; University of Birmingham, England; Rockefeller Foundation, and Harvard University. He lives in Abuja, Nigeria.