Still Life as a Colour Blind SongbirdBy Wale Ayinla
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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 ArtistAfter 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 SpeechBy 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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