To Make Sense of Heaven, I Drowned In Hell
They told us to wear our imans on our faces, like modular hearts.
But I wear mine as a triptych, alkaline and bowed in sujud.
I gnaw on the remnants of my sanity,
yet not all that is gnawed begs for exile.
Is it too audacious to grasp your faith and suspend it upon your heart?
All my prayers were performed upon the water’s surface.
I inquired of the water if purification is a communal thought
For those born with nascent faith.
It bade me ask the night that scrutinised my faith yesterday.
Tell me, is night another entity that warrants consideration
Before dawn’s arrival?
I swear, if I believed iman is what men die of in loneliness,
while their souls remain fresh,
There is breath oil in the graveyard’s hollow.
For those who died with only their conscience,
to make sense of heaven, they drowned in hell.
Displacement lost her weight after my physics teacher told me:
The distance between hell and heaven is your conscience.
I smiled at the garbage of acceleration displayed on a streamline
and asked its meaning. It replied,
“Righteousness is something you can see but cannot touch”
Perhaps it means being right is to be hard.
But another voice within me eclipses into thunder,
and I believed the world’s end begins with menace.
For iman isn’t an alternative to the mind.
Yet, all the salat I performed in ritual baths are haram.
So, the rigour done for heaven’s gaze has catalysts you know not of.
Wreckage Of Glowing Night
In every hour of struggle,
Darkness became the god we bowed to,
Torchlight scorched our foreheads, like promises,
Smoldering, forgotten before they even spoke.
I believed the night, thick with its own sorrow,
Held a secret glow—one it begged the day never to devour.
Each day, I watched a mother sculpt her suffering,
Her eyes drowning in it,
Pouring it into her children, like rivers
that never learned how to sink.
Last night, the air abandoned her beauty
when a mother’s voice caught a star—
She bared her teeth, sharpened with rage.
And I saw demons in the stars,
Rising, clawing at the feet of a mother’s defiance.
Barely, with the fleeting glance of an eye,
she dressed her children,
Before their voices withered into hollow silence.
I swear, I saw the beauty of a woman’s tears,
Trapped like birds inside her chest.
The night she worshipped wore her children’s bodies,
Carrying them back to the wreckage of their demise—
Back to a city, heavy with forgotten souls,
Where the weight of anxious prayers sinks deeper than the ocean.
A place where what a woman worships in her voice
Can drown the heavens.
Muhammad M Ubandoma is a fiction writer and poet from Nigeria. His work has appeared various in literary journals such as Synchronize Chaos, Brittle Paper, Kalahari Review, and many others.
Cover photo credit: Chungnhutphat