There was no body of water in this dream
but it must have been my ash in the urn
my lover was holding and trembling.
My mother was beside him in a neat coat
and stylish eyeglasses and high heels
that brought her head to the height of his chin.
I couldn’t remember having this wish
or telling my lover to cremate me
—I thought we used to be grave-lovers.
I had always wanted after death
for my relatives to visit me.
It was a ritual in my mother’s life
to take me to her own mother’s grave
even though I had never met her
though my mother strongly claimed otherwise:
she had died a few years after my birth.
The ash wasn’t plentiful, the wind not strong
to buoy my many pieces across the patch
of grassland I was being flung unto.
My mother looked like someone who would rather
have been somewhere else and why was my lover
taking so long to shake off the urn’s content?
Perhaps waiting for the slightest of winds.
It was an expensive-looking urn,
the kind of thing you would save to use
for another person’s gray remains;
it must have been my mother’s little gift,
the kind you give and expect to be returned.
—Okwudili Nebeolisa
Okwudili Nebeolisa is a Nigerian writer whose work has previously appeared in The Threepenny Review, Catapult, The Cincinnati Review, and elsewhere.
