Wait a Sec

(After Claudia Rankine)

by Ayomide Bayowa

You’re asked to wait for a few minutes to be called into the office earmarked to you at the immigration centre. You scramble on documentation updates; no time to delay. The officer who attended to you talks on the side over the phone—covering her mouth as if telling a white-collar secret to its mouthpiece. Your eyelids bulge from not sleeping after your night shift before resuming in the morning. You’re heated up in hastiness of people’s reasons for wanting to stay.
Their child. Their life. Tomorrow.
Your head is getting as light as the pain reliever container, joggled-empty. No two pills per day. You’re approximately one twenty six minutes-hand dizzy to your therapy appointment; you bring out a pocket mirror and contour brush from your handbag in maintenance of your face’s coffee-coloured foundation. Then two women, fair and fresh from the city’s honks and vehicles’ emissions, walk past you and into the office. The officer’s migrating fingers tap her keyboard into your awareness, so you leave your seat to ask what’s up. Whether she remembered to write your name down or if it was spelled correctly. No time for delay. She asks if you do not see her attending to someone: heavier and louder than a gravel slam. Then you feel your heart’s pulse in your head—suddenly. Your neck stretches in “n-word” reflex. Not that you like appearing autistic, but you’re grown to know that there’re more severe consequences for looking away.
As if you aren’t someone too!
Returning to your seat to exercise more patience, the women exit the office for the entrance of a couple more: uncalled. A time-lapse dizzy viewpoint like the city centre on weekends. As diagnosed by a physician, you have Cotard’s delusion. Tallying your religious leader’s vision about you having the walking corpse spiritual problem. Gentlemen do not see you whenever they are ready to settle down. How about gentlewomen?
Within a sec, the cops arrive and one of them whispers with the lady who attended to you, sharing spitty vocables, looking in your direction. He sees you. Only a white man in uniform could, anyway. He shadows you in space and style and asks you not to resist the catchy irons he quotes your wrists like an unsuitable suitor. For you don’t look like the lady in the card you tendered, your words will grow feet against you—should you choose the moment to practise pronunciation(s).
It turns out to be a regretful apprehension. You tell your therapist suing them might not be good for your record. You are turning green around the gills and your stretch marks are tearing more widely. Your stress-burnt cheeks map Northern sunburns; you clearly don’t look like yourself in your pocket mirror. Yet, you want to stay because your travel card is still green.
You can work. You are ready to—anytime.
Even though as the living ghost you are, just waiting-a-sec, you are another black file earthed in the police’s cabinet(s).

AYOMIDE BAYOWA

is an award-winning Nigerian-Canadian filmmaker, theatre artist, writer, and student of theatre studies and creative writing at the University of Toronto. Bayowa is the 2021–24 poet laureate of Mississauga, Ontario, Canada; the first runner-up of the University of Toronto’s Elly In Action Poetry Prize (2021); long-listed for the 2021 Adroit Prize for Poetry; plus a semi-finalist for the 2021 Cave Canem Poetry Prize. He has appeared in many literary magazines, including Beyond Words, Barren Magazine, Agbowó, Tipton Poetry Journal, Windsor Review, Guesthouse, Stone of Madness Press. He is the editor-in-chief of EchelonPoetry, Canada, and currently reads poetry for The Adroit Journal. His newest collection of poems, Gills, will be published by Wolsak and Wynn Publishers/Buckrider Books in spring 2023.