A Theory of Self as Broken Light

Ismail Yusuf Olumoh

if not brief interruptions in the silence of the world, would our breath have returned itself to dust? sometimes, I think we are just the divergence of a memory we do not remember being born into. or maybe we are a borrowed history, wearing our skin like a borrowed coat. our unspoken grief standing quietly at the back of the throat. & we call it "identity." don't you know that even the word trembles when you press it too hard? if you ask me who we are, I will tell you we are a thousand unfinished prayers braiding themselves into our spines. we are the broken metaphors hidden under the tongue because the world taught us fear before longing. aren't we the fingerprints of strangers who loved us before we learned to name them ancestors? we are the shadows of children still searching for language in the rubble of their first heartbreak: the heat of the broken glass still warm in their palms. a child pocketing broken syllables from the floor the way other children pocket marbles. maybe we are just the soft ache between two breaths waiting for someone to call it "belonging." we are a body of doubts searching for a language that can baptize us into meaning. maybe we are just a procession of metaphors learning to survive inside a wound. I think we are the aftertaste of history. I agree, there is no place like home, even smoke knows how to fold back into the air & call that disappearance a homecoming. I think we are the children of a brutal tenderness: carving our bones into a metaphor & never teaches us how to stop shaking. if you press a stethoscope to our future, you will hear a choir of trembling & a brief flicker of consciousness between two eternities of nothing. & look how we still try to call this little flicker: life.

About Ismail Yusuf Olumoh

Ismail Yusuf Olumoh, SWAN VII, is a writer and teacher pursuing a DVM at the University of Maiduguri. He won the Babatunde Babafemi Educational Foundation's Prize for Poetry (2024) and the Folio Literary Journal Poetry Prize (2025). His works appear/forthcoming in South Carolina Review, Bore Score Lit, April Centaur, Agbowó Magazine, Eye To The Telescope, Palette Poetry, Brittle Paper, Shallow Tale Reviews, Eunoia Review, Rowayat, Strange Horizons, and others. He is a reader in ONLY POEM. He writes from Ilorin, Kwara State. You can read him here: linktr.ee/icreatives0