Adesiyan Oluwapelumi
grief as a new language
a strange numbness strangles the widow's tongue
as she seeks to vowel a gore-stricken dirge,
& silence grazes like a cid heifer on the blisters
of her tongue. a famine of healing droughts
her green wounds & nothing corrodes
the heart more than the alkalinity of grief.
i beseech, how do we teach a woman to
swallow loss & digest the hard crumbs of sorrow,
for today my mother's voice is a prodigious
horse mouth in exile & nothing kills noise
more than this murdering silence.
yesterday, i wore my father's coat & like
an animated scarecrow, she screeched eerily in horror;
the scabbard of her blunt tongue slipped off
by the drawing hands of a stale memory.
today, i learn firsthand the language of grief
as mother's body roles as the sacrifice for a funeral
& my lips tremble like weathering rocks in silent
shivering shudders. i learn loss is the
root word of grief, & silence: its semantics.
as she seeks to vowel a gore-stricken dirge,
& silence grazes like a cid heifer on the blisters
of her tongue. a famine of healing droughts
her green wounds & nothing corrodes
the heart more than the alkalinity of grief.
i beseech, how do we teach a woman to
swallow loss & digest the hard crumbs of sorrow,
for today my mother's voice is a prodigious
horse mouth in exile & nothing kills noise
more than this murdering silence.
yesterday, i wore my father's coat & like
an animated scarecrow, she screeched eerily in horror;
the scabbard of her blunt tongue slipped off
by the drawing hands of a stale memory.
today, i learn firsthand the language of grief
as mother's body roles as the sacrifice for a funeral
& my lips tremble like weathering rocks in silent
shivering shudders. i learn loss is the
root word of grief, & silence: its semantics.
Biography
Adesiyan Oluwapelumi, TPC XI, is a young genre-bending creative who scribes from Ibadan, Nigeria. He is an Honourable Mention in the 2022 Coexist Lit International Metamorphosis Writing Contest, Winner of the Cheshire White Ribbon Day Creative Competition, & a shortlist in the August/September 2022 edition of the Brigitte Poirson Poetry Contest. His works are published/forthcoming in Visual Verse, Kissing Dynamite, Ice Floe Press, Unstamatic, Eunoia Review, Afristories, Brittle Paper, Lumiere Review, Opinion Nigeria & elsewhere. He reads poetry for The Kitchen Table Quarterly. Find him on Twitter @ademindpoems.
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