AN OPEN LETTER TO CREATURES

The Science of Dying

Dear creatures,
          this is how you will leave this world.
          ^IHouselights will dim their fluorescence and open their curtains,
                                     repeatedly, giving darkness a passage.
          ^IIThe air will braid its tentacles into thick black cornrows.
          ^IIIThe drums will be ripped, & streetlights will ignite fireworks like it’s new year.

          ^IVYour body parts will ascend
                      bursting into the sky leaving footprints like a raptured pus.
          ^VTime will hold its breath and declare the death with its name.

          ^VIO human,
                      you will decay and the termites will chew your flesh     drill your bones.
          ^VIIO cyborg,
                      you will rust and the terrain will hold something so mundane as your wires.
          ^VIIIO monsters,
                      an eye for an eye→ a tooth for a tooth→ flesh for flesh, the world will sing
          your exit songs.

^IXWhat I mean to say is, you will leave the thumbprint of your existence on earth
& your name will wear a new language—late.

^XYours.

Zaynab Iliyasu Bobi

Zaynab Iliyasu Bobi, Frontier I, a Nigerian-Hausa poet, digital artist, and photographer is a graduate of Medical Laboratory Science from Usmanu Danfodiyo University, Sokoto. She is the author of the forthcoming chapbook Sixteen Songs of Loss, selected as a finalist by Rita Mookerjee (Sundress Publications Chapbook Competition, 2023), winner of the inaugural Folorunsho Editor’s Poetry Prize 2023, Labari Poetry Prize 2023, the inaugural Akachi Chukwuemeka Prize for Literature 2023, and Gimba Suleiman Hassan Gimba ESQ Poetry Prize, 2022. Her works has appeared or forthcoming in Strange Horizons, FIYAH Literary Magazine, Uncanny Magazine, Fantasy Magazine, Agbowo, The Deadlands, Torch Literary Arts, Arc Poetry Magazine, Ake Review, Native Skin, The Drift, Lucent Dreaming, 20.35 Africa, Canthius, Trampset, and elsewhere. She tweets @ZainabBobi.

A Magazine of Science Fiction and Fantasy

AN OPEN LETTER TO CREATURES

by Zaynab Iliyasu Bobi in Uncanny Magazine Issue Fifty-Seven | 281 Words

Zaynab Iliyasu Bobi