When I Want to Write SeriouslyWhen I Want to Write Seriously
I Think of You For Whom I Wrote, For Whom I Revised |
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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 HundredsOf StoriesBy 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 ScarsBy 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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