Drowning

Tolu Ogunlesi

Defeat by water starts in the waiting

room of Fela’s fine print, accepting

the rule that water has no enemies.

Shall we stop assembling the life-vests?

The fine print insists that we accept

every instruction from the wheelhouse.

Shall we stop assembling? Life vests

a trembling finger with the final count.

Every instruction from the wheelhouse

is an orphaned bird, homeless.

Let the trembling finger finish counting,

we are nearer the end than ever.

We are orphaned birds, home-

less in dis-tended tang of ocean.

Nearer the end than ever, we’re also

drunken revellers resenting dawn.

This tang of ocean begins to blur

the lies that have sailed us this far.

Drunken, revelling, resenting dawn,

we hunt for red lights & STOP signs

to still the lies that’ve sailed this far.

We are on the last lap of the fine print.

The hunt is on for red ink, signature

to end the need to pretend to be immortal.

On this last lap of the fine print, we start

with forgetting how to swim, or struggle,

our need to pretend to be immortal,

replaced by the standing rules of water.

TOLU OGUNLESI’S fiction and poetry have appeared in Wasafiri, Transition, Sable, Magma, Orbis, VLQ, Westchester Review, Ad Fontes, and others. He's the winner of a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize and a PEN/Studzinski Literary Award, and was shortlisted for a 2023 Miles Morland Writing Scholarship. He lives in Abuja, Nigeria.