Blood Sonnet

Timi Sanni

for Ismail Mohammed A grain of hope shivered in his voice a split second before the gun. It must have been daylight in that city of angels, because God called his usual assembly and the brightest star was missing from the sky. I was deep in my fever dream in service of what is left of my country when the soldier served a volley through the door of your home. In Samaru. I worship the distance and its silent guilt covered by the arc of bullets. I think about the cold grieving of the dead which I know, not by name but as a place I pass through to reach my pain. I lived once in content that Nigeria, as an event, never happened (to me), until it did, with its sharp, shocking verb, the verbosity of the wounds that followed, blood transcending flesh to exist in memory as an elegy with no lament. They say we lived once in childhood. I confess my stillborn birth. I exist still as a dreaming thing in the womb and this is my longest nightmare. Wake me up.

About Timi Sanni

is a writer, editor, and multidisciplinary artist from Lagos, Nigeria. His debut chapbook, The Ordinary Affair of Being Human (Akashic Books, 2025), is forthcoming as part of the African Poetry Book Fund New-Generation African Poets series. He is the winner of the 2022 Kreative Diadem Writing Contest, the 2021 Anita McAndrews Poetry Award, and the 2020 Sprinng Poetry Contest. His work has appeared in Black Warrior Review, New Delta Review, Cincinnati Review, Poet Lore, The Rumpus, ONLY POEMS, and elsewhere.