"In This World of Mysteries, Sometimes, I Want to Be a List of Impossibilities" by Timi Sanni

Timi Sanni is a writer, editor, and Muslim literature advocate. An NF2W poetry and fiction scholar, his work appears or is forthcoming in Palette Poetry, Lucent Dreaming, Down River Road, Drinking Gourd Magazine, The Temz Review, X-R-A-Y Literary, and elsewhere. He is a reader for CRAFT literary and Liminal Transit Review and an editor at Kalopsia Literary. He is the winner of the SprinNG Poetry Contest 2020, the Fitrah Review Short Story Prize 2020 and third-place winner of the 2021 Stephen A. DiBiase Poetry Prize. Find him on twitter @timisanni

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In This World of Mysteries, Sometimes, I Want to Be a List of Impossibilities

to go for a swim in deathly waters / and return neither wet
nor bloody / to live and love / and not die these little deaths
of heartbreaks / to bring forth new lives / from every shard
of my frozen soul / and not first feel the pangs of demise //
again / to live / and not die / but what? Other than variations
of deaths / what / were we ever bestowed with as grace? I have
given myself / to the wind / and to death / that it may take me
at the toll of destiny's bell / but again I want not to be defined
by life's compendium / of possibilities