It is as though the dead bursts out in cadence as a scarf of prayers, heavy from coast to coast.
Look at them, as empty as the hands that feed them into the body.
I think of the choral of joy that has been bubbling in our heart as the boat drinks the sea with its loud music of loss and absence.
To cast a lot and to find in it a warning, a plea in ripples for the body.
Under the sun, praying for evening to come, a man bursts into tears as memory interrogates him with the stars in his pocket, the dissolved hopes across the ocean.
I don’t know how best to describe the greying concussion around his neck.
Maybe this is the origin of dust, a tinted dream carved from the lineage of ghosts.
What I mean to say is that I remember the sudden teething of our names into the sky, tongues descending to fit inside our palms.
But there I stand, in a stature of the ghosts of my yesteryears.
The sea glows in the softness of the horizon.
Where the river ends is where men’s dream begins: see Mauritania, Libya, now Harare.
Olokun’s children wage a shard upon the water, opening each person’s inherited wounds without permission.
The swine lend a hand for the loneliness, each man tucked to their knees like a promise, hoping that the sun isn’t wrapped around darkness.
Love is not the best Therapy
Wale Ayinla
How insignificant it is, now, to look at the road with memories lurking back into your head. It’s December and we are both happy in love, the swooshing sounds of our mangled hearts swell into the harmattan grays. Perhaps I have never been loyal to a feeling, buried in angst with bright flowers. Maybe this is love in its purest form. And then, the heart undresses whatever it touches. Might I be fair to bargain against earth’s darts, the soil over the tongue where the city never sleeps. In essence, I am a foreigner to my thoughts. Tell this the harder way. Say I love and I lose all. Say I gain all and I’m lonely. The perfect recipe doesn’t yet exist. Can’t you see it? Maybe if you look further, the secret might come to you dressed in a glass of red wine. Love is a limping song in the mouth of travelers, they adorn the journey with the wishes of the road bending into faces of people left behind. I take with me on this journey a different kind of sadness, a phantom of walls, a coaxed estrangement where the body exchanges it’s freedom for exile. I worship the road, fold my knees behind the tiny space on the bus going in the track of a snail. The common truth is that all bodies return to something, but love is the flame that keeps stretching.
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 or are forthcoming on Kenyon Review, AGNI, Guernica,Cosmonauts Avenue, Strange Horizon, TriQuarterly, Rhino Poetry, Poet Lore, and elsewhere. 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.