Love Fantasy & I Wonder Where You Are? by Joseph Christopher

Joseph C.P. Christopher is a poet. He is the author of Salient Whispers (2014) which was shortlisted for ANA/Chevron award for poetry in 2014 and his newest collection is titled Dust in the Rain (2020). His works have appeared in Aurora Journal, The Hellebore Press, Praxis Literary Magazine, Lunaris Review, and are forthcoming in Beir Bua Journal, The Tide Rises Literary Journal, Ample Remains Journal, Sturgeon Review, Derailleur Press to name a few. He is currently a doctoral candidate with Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, Nigeria. He lives in Abuja. ​​

Love Fantasy

I fell in love with a girl  
on the front cover of a weekly

tabloid. Afterwards, I nervously 
teetered the edge of quenchless 

fantasy. First, she looked like a junoesque feather of peacock floating in the sky. Then, 

like a thousand blossoming roses 
in aridity. This delusion I grew up with, 

hoping I would someday meet her in the rain or perhaps on my way home down

the prints of metrical inscriptions. Her 
eyes were a million stars, so 

florescent-bright that it burns
the chamber of lone desires. She wore 

a skimpy ankara outfit that showed off
her bare midriff. She  was something 

close to a bloodsucking apparition waiting 
to eat up one's eyeballs, then gulp down the 

charred chasm. Sometimes, I wished I 
tasted sweat-drops on her skin, other 

times, I wished she heard the quiet 
forlorn of sanded hope in my heart, eager 

to escape the wailings of a dying nation. 
Sometimes, I wished she took me far away
​
to a distant shore, where she and I will
listen unruffled to the heartbeat of the sea. I 

fell in love with a girl, riding the clouds of 
my imagination. 

I Wonder Where You Are?

I wonder what has become of you? Peaches? Berries? Birds? Dust? Water? 

Are you in a distant garden where silence opens up on cold fringes, and eats the 

earth in one's skin, or where void deepens like fresh wound appeasing blood parched

buds of the land? Are you in a place 
where nightfall stills the sun in one's 

tongue, tangles with a thousand whispers, each calling out the past and what they 

failed to accomplish? In my shower 
the other day, I catechized the pages 

in my mind; the unwritten memories yet spent, and what hidden annals buried 
there. It suffers me to think of you in time gone by. Are you in the universe of the 
immortal, where the soul and the body - tendrils of incompatible radiance, exist in 
a mire, each strangling the other? Are you the nervous fig branch in mama's hand or 
the whippy bamboo made to reprimand infant mischief? I remember how we used 
to bathe in that river near father's farm. You'd come home covered with skin rashes 
and I cholerae, eviscerated by the burden of abdominal torture. Mama would strike 
with a lithe implement of cow skin until our buttocks hurt and care for us 
regardless. Papa's sharp scolding undressed many hidden layers of apprehension as 
though it was a cutlass of wisdom. How unsubtle we were, full of fire and flames. 
Are you the flickering shadow in my dream, beckoning all night into 
the pleasant branches of sumptuous rhythms? Are you cold stillness of the sea 
absorbed into opaque provinces wombed in my thoughts. Are you the voice feeding fat 
in my head?