Benue in The Mouth of God
after 151 lost angels
at dawn, while having breakfast, i watch the news
like someone watches a speckled pigeon in slow motion,
the reporter mispronounces the village name, Yel-wa-ta
but the blood is accurate: the right hue, weight, viscosity,
forty, seventy-nine, maybe one hundred and fifty-one,
each number, a gaping maw, a hollowed-out shore,
each name, an ear of corn snapped from its stalk before the harvest.
one man carries the bodies
of his twenty family members
across the screen — this country glitches in morse codes
only a parted heaven can understand.
you, who have your house still erect
& children around your neck, have you seen
what a machete does to a girl’s chest?
how it opens a jagged door so small
no one can walk through?
have you heard the body shriek against the
kinetic embrace of bullets — a brief exploding vacuum
before the tissue understands how to collapse into itself.
again the reporter comes into view,
i watch him loosely grip the microphone with
weak & sweaty hands as it were catfish,
the plastic cold against his shiny eyes & shed a tear
white enough to bleach the sky.
behind him, the wind licks up the ash across a burned compound.
a charred brown sandal peeks from the rubble.
it is big enough to belong to a boy
who thought the sky was only for things with wings.
——-
Enduring Gifts
my grandmother leaves me
a syllabary of things:
an eye that measures time
by the slow unfurling of a fern,
the way to walk
without shivering like a clockwork toy
in a borrowed city,
a voice lowered
in reverence.
she leaves me
grief folded like a batik fabric,
i wear it on festive days
when the ache must colour & shine.
from her,
i inherit both yielding and faith
& the stubborn belief that love,
no matter how moth-eaten,
still wraps itself
around the living.
——-
Oranges
after three women
there are oranges around the table,
in the front yard, in my bedroom,
in my study while drinking mint tea —
my two sisters & my mother,
bright little planets, fattened with carpels of pulp
cutting the sun with fragrance.
oranges imbued with floral, with scarves
and tasbih, with chatter & my sisters nudge
at each other while laughing in the passageway.
their laughter peeling the cold from the skin of winter.
nothing screams here. the air is shaping more air
into tiny flower bombs I can launch at the world —
the entire house is made of rinding,
anointed henna hands slick with the joyous history
of feeding, feral, unbrusing, grace,
love embroidered in washed out apron hems.
there are oranges on the table,
washed clean like my mother’s hands in ablution,
oranges knifed with the delicateness of prayer:
they shine, spilt open,
fill the mouth despite trembling,
move the abacus of language —
the fervent calculation in semantics.
i taste them again, again & again,
with everything my body gives me,
& remember i was made sweet
by women ripened in their light.
——-
Poems (c) Abiodun Salako
Image: ChatGPT remixed