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When I Want to Write Seriously

When I Want to Write Seriously
I Think of You For Whom I Wrote,
​For Whom I Revised
By Ojo Taiye
i move my mouth as if silently
reading                 pronunciations
 
like grief bloodflowers
opaque bodies
 
at night i greet an empty room
               
                & fill it   [with]  
delicate
                conversations
 
carefully holding a promise
i wrote in my mind so that
 
               i remember
                defamiliarize
                                                my
                                writing
 
& sit in a church pew writing
           p-p-p prose poems at funerals
 
i seduce a poem into believing
i can home it i can provide it
a fistful of hay & oven scarlets
 
until the poem forgot its               way
back
 
troubled i let go

My Face, Once Full of Hundreds

Of Stories

By Ojo Taiye
                              I
 
do i assert an onset of Alzheimer’s
after forgetting my sister’s face?
               --you know, what’s her name?
a collapsed dune
seeping from the hole in my head
 
how do i know when it starts?
is it a dim boundary— perhaps de-men-tia
from climbing the stairs to retrieve
something but being
               unable to remember what?
 
my neurons keep struggling
to recalibrate        slowly vocabulary becomes
an unfamiliar tool—each word—a flotsam
 
just out of reach & hard to snag
lining them up is so much effort
 
that i can sit through pasta & salads
sometimes as far as dessert
               completely wordless
 
                              II
 
the self i knew inches away— 
friendships save for one or two
start to get left behind
 
               no more travelling
               no more family events
 
& i stop going to mass
& then i missed a close
neighbor’s funeral
 
shedding myself downward
               almost wholly earth
 
 
 
my body has become less
a prison than an aquarium— 
eyes distorted by water &
that thick impermeable
membrane
 
my latter & former self
on separate sides
of the glass

A River of Scars

By Ojo Taiye
bear with me a little longer
my mother said    a voice pulling
fireflies & chewing them into
pure light  
 
it happened in the month after
i turned thirteen the synovial
fluid in her left hip began
to evaporate like rain  
leaving only bone sore
with a limp         
 
ashamed of her scars &
the clunking way she walks
across a dance floor or any
room bustling with happy
& oblivious people
 
pop culture—i should want
to be looked at [but when she
was regarded    i didn’t know
how to feel]—the kingdom
of the sick is not a democracy:
lie down. bend forward.
               walk for me

Ojo Taiye was born and grew up in Kaduna, Nigeria. He currently lives in Agbor, Delta State. He is a poet and essayist, and teaches Tourism in Calvary Group of Schools, Agbor. His recent poems and works have appeared in Glass Journal, Lit Mag, Crannog Magazine, Geometry Magazine, Southword Journal and elsewhere.

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