BODIES

 

by Tajudeen Muadh

        

                                                                                        

along the streets of Abere, a boy was lynched, burnt, his body learning the language

of fire.

 

I watch how the blood in his face dried. some boys, calling ole while a liquid I know burns him down to ashes.

 

see, his ashes is how to nudge between salvaging between east and west, how the poems in his body calls for social justice, how his body is a testament, let me not say testimony of how cruel living is. another boy is his dreams is black, one white , one Caribbean, one dust, in his mouth are methods of calling God in all different ways, one in the poems of his body, and the other in his broken burnt bone.

 

this is a recollection of how a  body carrying a holed chest returns into afterlife to see the aftertaste of reading dust. this is how to call for a gunshot learning to gorge itself out of holes it learns to get in.

 

it is how he learns to weave the fuchsias in his mouth into poems, a petrichor from his body learning to pronounce lynch as live.

 

how he augusts the smell of his own body carrying himself in and out of it.

 

they say a body stowed by a stylet is a synonym for a body mapping itself into years of grief and hope, both forming a calculation around his neck.

 

they say his body is covered with a marsupium, learning to fly, but phoenixed by his burnt skin.

 

in his body, fire is another meaning for freedom, freedom from searching for a belly filled with words turning to poems, poems turning to grief, griefs returning to his body like a flower creeping out of his body.

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Tajudeen Muadh is a young poet from Osun State, Nigeria. His works has appeared or is forthcoming in different literary magazines and journals including The Kalahari Review, Beneath the Mask, Art Lounge, Eboquills, Spill Words and elsewhere.