By: Ojo Taiye
~2020 Finalist, Adult
beginning with a line from Ilya Kaminsky & after
Torrin A. Greathouse & Cortney Lamar Charleston
i was in my bed, around my bed— & the world was falling.
consider how much hurt will be the prize of negligence.
what could i possibly offer to save them— on this ground,
where my bones or what shapes me, has now been severe,
taught that it doesn’t belong— where i cannot say malnutrition
& not suggest asylum. here, i see a child’s soft simulation of home,
& think first of my grandmother, her teeth antiqued by cigarette
smoke— how she makes a lush garden grow on her backyard,
every spring— these young shoots of familial histories, of narrative
thread— damaged fruits like the silence of snapped bough, bird-less
feathers unhinged from inside a gaping mouth— a poem that can be
read after a question’s heft. where a child’s sky does not suggest holy
green, or all those healthy children, with no other thought but to thrive.
here, the days are thick with migraine. bodies deprived to the point
of shame—& i think of my little sister who puts her lot beside my bed in
the shack. perhaps, this doesn’t convey resemblance—we need a home & a
crow eyes me from a tree, colluding with my past, by distance, distance
meaning apocalypse, meaning calving glaciers, meaning heartbreak.
