The rains have blessed the ground.
Luscious green sweeps the brimming expanse
and Mr. Mohammed’s farm resembles a jungle.
I’m late for work.

One agama,
two female lizards
and a white butterfly
come to say hello.

Beneath my skin,
old memories hum like an unfinished song.
My body knows the way.

The wind screams from the lungs of an ailing man,
from the hut of the bone setter,
and I think to myself,
the bone is perfect.

The bone.
My bone.

I remember the story over rice and soup,
over the voices of the women
that nursed me into womanhood.

They told it like a fable of Ananse,
in the hot darkness
of Accra’s evening load shedding.

They say I was carried through a morning
much like this one.
Snatched in the middle of a massage bath.

They say at two days old,
Grandma had pressed a little too hard,
my right thigh bone
snapped like a biscuit.

They say I shrieked like the midnight bird
and the louvers cracked
in patterns of Nkyinkyim.

They say the bonesetter took me in his hands,
so small and angry at the world’s first betrayal,
he set the break
with a patience that belonged
more to rivers than to men.

They say he spoke to my body,
low and certain,
they say he wove me back into myself
before the wound could take root.

I have no memory of it.
Only the ghost of it,
folded somewhere
in the deeper parts of me.

They say they see it
in the way I stand,
in the way I move,
in the way I endure.

And so I walk past the hut
and each step is a hush,
a benediction almost.

For as the wind screams
from the lungs of an ailing man,
from the hut of the bone setter,
I smile
and I think to myself,
the bone is perfect.