Migration Blues

In the season when the earth’s axis tilts away
from the sun, eating daylight shortly after

            it is born, I miss the tropical home that spat
            my body into the ravenous mouth of exile.

I press my thighs into the $5 wool blanket 
I got off a clearance sale rack. 

            Through my window, I catch stars twinkling
            into my eyes & cataloging stored images 

of warmth—me & my five siblings, singing 
to cattle egrets flying in the blue sky
 
            leke leke, gimme one finger, I love you & hoping 
            it rains a bit of its beauty as white patches

on our index or middle fingernails. Alone
in this new country, my eyes sunken, mourning
 
            miles & years lost to diaspora. My memory forms
            a rhythm for joy. It rewinds every birthday 

photograph my siblings & I took
in front of our father’s 1983 orange Mercedes 200t,

            posing to outshine one another—images survive 
            in memory. I mistake memory

for reality & stretch my hands outside the window, 
signaling my siblings to come play hide & seek

            with me. But the sky throws snowballs into my hands.
            Younger me would mistake them for cold cotton

candies. So I chew them before they die away from my palms.
This is what my siblings & I, younger, would have done, anyway. 

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Obiageli A. Iloakasia was born and raised in Benue State, Nigeria. She is the recipient of the 2024 Creative Writing Award at the University of Memphis and a finalist for the 2022 SprinNG Women Authors Prize. Her work has appeared or are forthcoming in The Rumpus, Sigma Tau Delta Rectangle, SprinNg, Poetry Potion, and elsewhere. Iloakasia is a former Senior Poetry Editor for The Pinch and the current Guest Poetry Editor for The Shallow Tales Review. She is an MFA candidate at the University of Memphis, Tennessee.