by Divine Inyang Titus
Was life beautiful before Apollo 8? Did you know, before we saw earth rise above the lunar horizon,
that you could fall through me forever & never land? Life is beautiful, when I moonwalk into a dream
where the world’s temperature is friendly. Earth rage only burns children. I want us to have some, and
so we must save the butterflies. Let the children chase wonder across the field of peonies, their glorious
bellies wobbling in delight. Release them into birdsong and the baaing of goats rising from grass to
grace, to bellow the kind of laughter that deflects an asteroid. I lost faith in the afterlife & it freed me to
love this one. To love like I belong here, to wish unlike Okigbo to be so tethered, even to the eternal
unstillness. Life is beautiful, said the man with the ugly death-scar, and this is what I will tell my
children when they cry. Pointing up at the bloom of the twinkling stars above, I will tell them: from
up there, we’re so beautiful it has to be true.
Divine Inyang Titus is an assistant editor at Afapinen and the author of the chapbook A Beautiful Place To Be Born. He is a joint winner of the 2023 Brigitte Poirson Literature Prize for Fiction and a past winner of the STCW Future Folklore Climate Fiction Contest, 2021. His stories and poems have been featured in Brittle Paper, The Ex-Puritan Magazine, Blue Marble Review, The Parliament Literary Journal, The Shallow Tales Review, and elsewhere.