Lake Kivu Dream

Mess of streets and shanties, crossroads of war where masses throng,faces sunken and hands begging at barred truck windows, the trucks

speeding to camps birthed in blood, the fields fallowed by the flowinglava and the roads caked molten all the way from the slopes

of Nyiragongo down to the shore where I stand, staring intothe lake’s depths—waiting for what I can’t say. Only, a vapor

rises somnolent, and beneath the layers of the lake, somewherethe methane lies limnic, waits under volcano shadow

belching cloud and ash over the paving roads and walls torn by shellsand lava and hands piecing together brick by brick, war’s rubble,

peace’s silence. To which my back is turned. Somewhere a man wakesto see his children sleeping, somewhere he goes outside and sees

his neighbors sleeping, somewhere he rides his bike up to craterridge and sleeps underneath the jujube tree. Somewhere a troop

of silverbacks circle a termite castle, poking and proddingwith the bluntness of their fingers, withdrawing to see bug whiteness

and mandibular henna tattoos. Somewhere green leaves maskgreen shirts, hovering spider-like in cookfire smoke,

watching children at play with metamorphic pebbles, bouncing awaythe hours in their hands, and somewhere, the lava has reached the shore,

sinking beneath the surface and creeping along the floor to the million-partsof poison trapped under the gentle waves. I await the detonation

and release, toxic and calming, that I will breathe myself into a sleepso numb I could take the first step into ankle-deep—without fear,

but knowing that beneath the surface there are bodies.