PORTRAIT OF A BOY AT THE MOUTH OF WATERS
a boy is suffused with the metaphors of colors
he wouldn’t bleed, his mother says: you’re the
embryo wearing the world in the germ cells of
my dreams, and he hatches into silence.
poems like this chisel themselves into images
of boys that have forgotten the
pseudonyms their bodies house, say their throats
bemoan waters because they imprison stuttering
thoughts in their mouths.
say he’s silence after the ricochet of bullets, say he’s
silence scurrying the teeth of alprazolam for peace, say
he’s thirst, say hunger. a day unfurls him into wind
and a priest of hope collects his disheveling self, flustering
across the body he’s now a refugee to, into the feet of
a stream, he, a wreckage shapeshifting
into a baptizand. “May this water suck grief from your
wounds,”the priest said. As his back kisses the water,
before blueing the horizon with ennui.
PORTRAIT OF BODIES IN HARMONY WITH GRIEF
This poem holds an anchor / to untether a soul / from a wreck / it lifts the back a boy from baptism and / his body uproots from waters / gaping a hollow for the hungry ripples to consume / the boy says, “how long would it take for my tongue to heal from the distraught of silence and pain tunneling through me?” / an unbeknownst silence answers // on the night I met him / we tried to suck grief from each other’s tongue / from bodies of botched therapies & botched baptism // before we learnt how to hinge fire beneath our skins / like active volcanoes about to vomit sorrow / an art of hell spawning / fitting our demons on our heads like war bonnets / He, in a cordial with silence / and I, in a cordial with weltschmerz.
BIO:
Olowonjoyin Muhammed Sanni is a penultimate of Biochemistry in University of Ilorin. He is a lover of art and chemistry. His works have been published or forthcoming in Woven Poetry anthologies, Livina Press and other literary blogs. When he’s not tracing biochemical pathways, he’s either writing or thinking about making his life better. He tweets at @aperse_
