Wale Ayinla
Gone
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USD $7.00
24 pages A love cherished and lost. . . |
Excerpt
Speech Therapy
I place a coin in my blood, a brief surrendering,
and pretend that my body isn’t a glass, with cracks
for a skin. tiny countries of nightingales. a delight
with years weaning off. my mother is the silence
that grows in a small still room of my heart.
patches of voice arrayed in smoke. a dull fireplace.
the making of a child whose teeth carry white
flames of loss. a dandelion hewed for breath.
of ashes collected into vocabularies. an arrival
of shadows for safety. the pearled holes. tell me,
is freedom not the enslavement of choices. the mind
stained with boundaries. the human mind is a glittering
tower, a temple of moths. the majesty of possibilities.
it ends here, the mouth not ordinary but a window
swallowing the constellation. the mouth an inventory
of dusk. nobody knows the hunger of my name,
the shelled air, a sore jeweled to the scalp. the valley
of my soiled will. so awed they become Lilith, a territory
of deadly secrets. bodies picked up with freckles.
a discoloration. the mist dissolving into ghosts.
I place a coin in my blood, a brief surrendering,
and pretend that my body isn’t a glass, with cracks
for a skin. tiny countries of nightingales. a delight
with years weaning off. my mother is the silence
that grows in a small still room of my heart.
patches of voice arrayed in smoke. a dull fireplace.
the making of a child whose teeth carry white
flames of loss. a dandelion hewed for breath.
of ashes collected into vocabularies. an arrival
of shadows for safety. the pearled holes. tell me,
is freedom not the enslavement of choices. the mind
stained with boundaries. the human mind is a glittering
tower, a temple of moths. the majesty of possibilities.
it ends here, the mouth not ordinary but a window
swallowing the constellation. the mouth an inventory
of dusk. nobody knows the hunger of my name,
the shelled air, a sore jeweled to the scalp. the valley
of my soiled will. so awed they become Lilith, a territory
of deadly secrets. bodies picked up with freckles.
a discoloration. the mist dissolving into ghosts.
About the Author
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Wale Ayinla is a Nigerian poet, essayist, and editor. He is the author of To Cast a Dream (Jai-Alai Books, 2021), selected by Mahogany Browne for the 2020 Toi Derricotte and Cornelius Eady Chapbook Prize. His works recently appeared on Guernica, Cosmonauts Avenue, Strange Horizon, North Dakota Review, South Dakota Review, TriQuarterly, Rhino Poetry, Poet Lore, and elsewhere. He is a staff reader for Adroit Journal. He has a Pushcart prize nomination and several Best of the Net and Best New Poets Award nominations, & in 2020, he was a finalist for numerous prizes which include the Jack Grapes Poetry Prize. His manuscript, Sea Blues on Water Meridian was a finalist for the inaugural CAAPP Book Prize and the 2020 Sillerman First Book Prize.
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