In Memoriam

Gone.
The saddest word in the language.
In any language.
Mark Slouka

Maybe one day my grandmother would return with the sweetest oranges she used to buy/ all cut up by love/ all offered with a smile that now only lives where orange exists/ maybe I’d follow her come here  with an actual coming/ maybe I’d morph myself into the space between her and my mother and become cyanoacrylate/maybe I’d whisper into her ears, place your daughter’s head on your thighs, teach her how to bend earth with her feet, embrace her for half a hundred years of absence/ maybe I’d tell her to put out her cracked feet let me wash them/ I’d tell her that her hair of white is a field of moon glitter / then wring my small brain into finally realising her laughter is the ocean that I am/ maybe I’d tell her she smells of all the things I didn’t know/ richness/ stainless/history/ everywhere she carried her children with her/ even in the dark where she tongued them into the mouth of a god that would haunt my mother to death/ from the window, I’d watch her forget how to look at the back of her daughter when leaving again and again/ maybe I’d tell her each time, her daughter would cry in the passageway/ tears I picked like Kyoho grapes/ ripe from all parting/maybe I’d offer her an orange upon her return this time/ saying take all this little boy’s sweetness and smile too/ maybe the pool of grief turned shadow that followed her when she left would burn away / maybe I’d kiss her for the first time on that pale cheek peeling from aloneness/ with nose/ with teeth/ with chest as warm as pudding/ burying my whole face into her shrinking/ maybe death is the closest thing to love when there is no love.

———

The Days of Woodpecker and Salmon

It is July, the days of the woodpecker and salmon
+++the first time of the year
we sit in a cafeteria together,
+++beside the sea, beside tanned hands

in so close a space our laugh
+++pierce into the skin of doughnuts,
we cross pollinate thoughts
+++bumblebee to flower and backwards,

who sucks and who swallows,
+++we are one and the same thing,
you ask about the scar on my
+++chapped lips, then the stories behind

things diffuse into other stories,
+++inside the carbuncle of my chest
bleached from all those non-togetherness
+++all that sleep tucked away in phone lines:

I want you to ask more, ask me
+++why I look at you like a bat,
what daydreams ruin the shape of my head,
+++why I’m unpacking my eyes

like a suitcase, the invisible clothes
+++left on the third chair that seemed empty
but maybe you too are unpacking,
+++maybe you too slipped

a secret note inside the closet
+++of my ears, maybe I couldn’t hear them,
just maybe you ask where my heart’s spirit
+++leans and Jesus comes to make a man cry in

one eye and you shine in his other eye.

———

Poetry (c) Abiodun Salako

Image by Jorge Lujan from Pixabay