We Only Care About The Beautiful Things
the clock is moving backward, & the sun
is stealing the traces of our smiles.
everything bears the negative meaning
of its name—the smiles we pretend to
be missing, the embrace of the light, and
the dryness of the sky. we only care
about the things with flashy skins.
the wind kept swinging between two
end-points: water & hell. water is blind,
the hell has flares. father said, the thing next
to water is flame. the flame is blind too. yet,
we only care about the beautiful things.
there is a garden on our palms. water is red,
roses are red. everything looks strange from
within. roses are beautiful, and red water is horrible.
& we only care about the beautiful things.
we are servants of what refused to be ours.
we are boys, we are men, & sometimes
we identified as commodities on a market
stalls. the market, a dark room. the stalls,
a thorn bed, massaging the curtain between
our skins and bones. it is all monstrous.
but still, we only care about the beautiful things.
Contributor’s Bio
Mubarak Said, TPC XII, SprinNG & SAF Alumni, is the winner of the 2023 Bill Ward Prize For Emerging Writers (Prose) and the Threposs poetry contest. He is also the 3rd runner-up in 2022 of the Bill Ward Prize for Emerging Writers (Poetry) and longlisted in Gimba Suleiman Hassan esq poetry prize. Mubarak is an editor at the African Literary Summit Anthology, a poetry reader at the White Cresset Journal, and a guest contributor at Applied Worldwide, US. He is a member of the Hilltop Creative Arts Foundation. His works are forthcoming from and published in Brittle Paper, Kalahari Review, Spillwords, Eboquills, Fevers of the Mind, Ghudsavar, World Voices Magazine, Literary Yard, Upwrite Magazine, Wellerism, Teen Literary Journal, New Feathers anthology, Acedia Journal, ILA magazine, Love/heartbreak anthology, Piker Press, Madswirl, Ninshar Arts, Inspired magazine, Pine Cone Review, Doublespeak Magazine, Memory House Magazine, SprinNg, Sink Magazine, Arting arena, Synchronized chaos, Susa Africa, culture cult press, south broadway press, Lothlorien journal, Peppercoarst lit, Literary cocktail, Applied Worldwide, Opinion Nigeria, Today Post, Daily Trust and elsewhere.
