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Still Life as a Colour Blind Songbird

By Wale Ayinla
identity modelled in black satin   
amidst a plethora of shadows
I am trying to be faithful to my reflection
yet grief is a theorem for escape yet
I consider every threat to hasten depression
after all no one calls a brown boy
a chimney of pity in the orange sun
from under courage opens a moon
small in the estate of lonely watchdogs
what are you waiting for the warmth
of your groin in the presence of water
bottles unforgiving as night zooms in
in blurry apertures so long as no one is burying
a loved one there is a need for an abundance
of rainfall in the hand with teeth muttering chorus
in heavenly tongues yet you must see language
as a possible disaster and a July dried by weight
etcetera I am not saying christening mystery
is rhetoric I earned the name preacher
from blessing aches with a grey sadness

The Hate Artist

After Wale Owoade
By Wale Ayinla
i. who says my body won’t survive in a pool of an April wind
​
ii. I keep my knees closer to God in prayer & I don’t call it worship

iii. I cup loneliness as an epigraph to and fro the ululation of emptiness

iv. someday I’ll love where mother’s shadow falls on my body & a day is a hundred dark voices alive

v. when you asked me to fly grief held me in flight to hell

vi. it’s hard to put together what never fought for this space before it all began

vii. I watch the knife lead the kitchen into the rain of onions ‘cause that’s where hope stays

viii. little speeches are a basket of submerging furnace & I wouldn’t listen to the radio without my heart asking where God is

ix. I can feel the hole in the song of the birds at dawn under my feet

x. what leaves us behind holds on to us dearly & my father’s ghost is a painkiller

xi. in this haunted room my voice is thicker than my bones
​
xii. I gulp absence as a sun fading into the belly of the ocean & no elegy survives in a shackle of hope

Self-Adulation as an Organ of Speech

By Wale Ayinla
Planes fly higher than birds.
               Birds flock more in unity than loneliness.
               Grief is bilabial. My face is rare
                     
on the skin of the air inside me.
Somebody calls me a cave.
               I call myself a living testament—closed
 
on the inside by a sacrifice. I buy words
               for myself. You see, I see colours the way
the earth grinds dust. The way the forecast alters
 
               itself. They say it will rain tomorrow
but I crave water in the sun-burnt noon.
               They say thunder will fall from the teeth
 
of the sky. I welcome it with my ears
               tucked in my palms. As voiceless as the night
may be, the stars scream into my pupils.
 
               They keep what is not theirs. A word before
a body sets its bones on fire. My throat yearns
               for places to grow this speech.   & I am
 
a sickle carving the wind to myself.
               A leaf falls from my body every night.

Wale Ayinla writes from the ancient city of Abeokuta in Nigeria. He teaches Government at Triumph College. He is a Best of the Net Award nominee, and his work appears in Palette Poetry, FLAPPERHOUSE, Kalahari Review, SOBER., and elsewhere. He is @Wale_Ayinla on Twitter.
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