Exit Wound​

By Ayokunle Samuel Betiku ​

what happens when poetry becomes a religion?
it means for every cut, there is a hand stitching
mirrors from a typewriter. isn’t poetry a form
of prayer—a dumpster for blood moons larger
 
than the body. i want to invoke something glazed
with light, but here again i find you dusking
the spaces of my mouth—dear country. where do
we begin? chibok grows inside me like wild
 
almonds: girls plucked away from home by a bevy
of shadows wielding guns & stilettos. believe me,
absence is a terrible thing. & i wish to unfetter
myself from the weight of names hovering like
 
pigeons around the house. everything becomes
a souvenir for what is misting. a place to reinvent
the body into a geyser. my friend floats into the
distance at night & returns with his tongue reeking
 
of soot & crimson. what do we make of what names
us after the futility of echoes?  i mean to say we are
always falling into the gilded hands of gods: recycled
promises. they say peace, but what they mean is sun-
 
rise razed from the firmament. & here is evidence:
beside the blackened rubble still fresh like a bruise,
a little girl & her younger brother scrape the last bit
of joy from the wreckage of a bowl. these days,
 
i’m afraid of the TV. i'm afraid of what makes me
the closest thing to a monsoon sky--

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Portrait Of The Mediterranean Sea As Escape Route

By Ayokunle Samuel Betiku

​ 
pardon me, a redefinition is needed here,
    but i must warn that whatever ends this has less
 
to do with water than with fire. i come
    from a place where borders also mean another way
 
to unlearn burdens. which means: many here
    morph into birds in forbidden ways. which means:
 
home has become the slitting edge
    of the blade. & it is no little trick to carry the sun in
 
one’s eyes. in this poem, my friends wriggle
    like worms towards Libya, & the interlude of dunes
 
& storms fades into an European fantasy.
    here, the sea beyond is an honey-rimmed salt.
 
i shadow into this image of me locked
    in the heavy clouds of their embrace as wild sunflowers
 
grew from tomorrow into their ears.
    what pitch was the sound of the sea—does that matter
 
when a place is tongued by hell? in the end,
    the sky had gone dusty & webbed over by grey spiders
 
before the wind gave my friends back to me
    in different forms—some as broken images, some as
 
jumbled alphabets, some as mere names. 

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Virtual Reality​

By Ayokunle Samuel Betiku

an array of laughter breaks
                     the hedges of a fairy tale.
there are no hands here
                 snatching bodies for ransom.
there is rain: the air screams
                in the rain, but this is only
the thunder flirting with her,
                not bullets teething her skin.
there is rain: the children
                  gift naked bodies to the rain
& dance in the mud
              to the song of spattered roofs,
the world’s sweet dimness
              reeling around them. in the woods
we become the wind, the rain-
           bow shrubbery swaying & tilting
like drunken bodies.
           here, no one releases hawks
from their throats to perch
           at another's eyes. we tickle our faces
with our names. we tickle
      the sun’s blood orange eye back to gold.
at night, this is no city
       blinking an ocean behind its walls.
at night, holy is the body
       slipping into God’s seventh day.             

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Ayokunle Samuel Betiku writes from the city of Ondo, South West Nigeria. He is a Young Writers and Creatives' Award Fellow. He won the Eriata Orihbabor Poetry Prize for 2020, the BKPW Writing Contest for February 2021 and the Wakaso Poetry Prize for March 2021. His works have appeared or are forthcoming in journals and anthologies, including Libretto, Kreative Diadem, Lunaris Review, Pandemic Publications, Rough Cut Press, The Offing & elsewhere.