Cosmology of the Cloud with Baba as the Rain Maker

Hussain Ahmed

        I.The sky is a rolag, carded with grief and dew.We were made in the image of our dead – because God relies on recyclingto keep the earth going around the sun.         II.Each of my father’s eyes is a globe of brown worms,or bulb of sperm cells swimming towards an egg in search for light. He no longer reads the Qur’an without his glasses.This ritual of whirling in the first rain has no origin story.         III.Today, the sky looked freshly molded from clay,I jumped inside the rain with my hands raised to the sky. No one stays in it for long, so it doesn’t unmake the scarson our heads – healing and almost forgotten.         IV.The puddle sometimes gets large, it drags a child away. Everyone lost to the water was recovered without their eyes,that’s how I know that fish love to swallow whatever resembles a lamp.

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photo of Hussain Ahmed

Hussain Ahmed is a Nigerian poet and environmentalist. His poems are featured or forthcoming in AGNI, POETRY, Kenyon Review, Transition Magazine and elsewhere. He is the author of a chapbook, Harp in a Fireplace (Newfound, 2021), and currently an MFA candidate in Poetry at the University of Mississippi.

cover of Four Way Review Summer 2021

Issue 21

New York, New York

Editor
Ross White

Managing Editor
C. Brynn Downing

Assistant Poetry Editors
Conor Bracken
Taylor Brunson
Nandi Comer
Lauren Miner
Keith S. Wilson

Four Way Review is an online, triannual electronic journal from non-profit, independent press Four Way Books. In addition to our three yearly issues, we post new poems, stories, or interviews each month. We publish poetry and fiction from both established and emerging authors through our open submissions process. In 2012, we celebrated the Review‘s inaugural issue and, in 2018, the 25th anniversary of Four Way Books.

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