BOLAJI BADEJO by Kami Enzie
I put on my suit every day for work.
It takes three hours.
cannot live inside it for more than fifteen
or twenty minutes or I die. So, I don’t.
I take it off, to put it back on, again. It wears me.
Shirtless under key lights, I can barely hear or see
from my black latex cavity, filled with boiled moimoi
when I slip in it, flamed and pounded. A steamed dish
of sliding beans, meat falling from bones, seasoned
with red pepper, we break for lunch. When shooting
stops, I see more outside my suit. With no makeup
on me they see me less. We become the worlds apart
from each other on set. My invisibility dress hangs
heavy from my hanger shoulders. One could say
that I capture and kill without seeing it. Graceful
and vicious, I stalk under lights, in dark corners,
moving slow and deliberate. I like art. I build
up muscles in my body, my clawed fingers
spread into equilateral triangles reaching out
or a snack. My black extendible jaw salivates
KY jelly across grotesque bodily appendages.
They give me tons to drip. They phone every
hospital and pharmacy in the area asking to buy
as much as they would let us have. Holes drilled
through my chest, my gnarly arms, to breathe.
The sun rises on other planets where a day is always
more than a day on earth. That is the sun rises
on my back. You’re scared I want your body
for my surrogate womb. All I said is I never dreamed
Hollywood as my surrogate home. Most divine
beings are aliens. Some aliens have uncles
in Lagos. Every galactic body deserves fandom.
Go home! I will. We love you! I love this country
like an actor loves their script. You’re very special!
Red insides engorged, ran hot with expensive metal,
under my black suit, in fifteen pieces, my heart, an autonomous
machine, feeling. My ribcage fits. I drag seven black
Caliban feet on a stage of stars, the vulpine earth.
Kami Enzie (he/him) is a Vienna-born, New Orleans–raised queer Black writer. His work appears in Chicago Review, Common Place, Cotton Xenomorph, The Glacier, Ki, Oxford Poetry, The Poetry Review, and Quarter Notes. He is an alumnus of Tin House Winter Workshops, VCFA's Postgraduate Writers’ Conference, and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. (IG/BS/X: @yungwerther)
