This Doom
I am still learning to die for myself.
I can’t unremember a few. And I know
people who are enough gravity, who
will look you in the bullseye and say:
this is how to stay, this is how to live.
But here are their hands, tugging onto
the rainline from their eyes calling God
from the other end as if there are
no dews left to moisten their hearts
but summer is a distance and the days
are dreaming winter as I spring this out
like a heart into a synchrony of melody
as I sing this song as if the lyrics were a knife
jacked out of my voicebox. I couldn’t keep
anything safe. I couldn’t keep people.
I’ve been excusing myself from myself
but dear body, remember the world grew
from a temple with no one in it
but on a Friday I can meet some strangers
and tell them why they should stay
for the weekend’s sake and for nothing’s—listen.
There’s an orchestra xylophoning your ribs
and some drummer beating your heart purple.
There is music in your pain.
There is gravity beneath your breastplate
and you may breathe them out.
See, I’m trying too.
Ars Poetica
I’m always smaller
than my mother’s arm.
And there is no place to die
and this is enough reason to live.
I Am Here
And every night, I apologize to myself for choosing this way of all the thousands of ways I could have ruined me. I can’t even blame my hands. And I died of it. It was unbelievable. I died of it. I’m running into the nights in search of this solace at the mercy of smaller silence but I was the noise. I heard everything else so well I couldn’t hear my heartbeat. It was deafening. I can’t turn my back at all these days and watch tomorrow from a sunset. I’ve met a few happy people whom we never met. I want to take place in this body before existing. It’s another night. The streetlights are bowing with no light on their faces begging for hope. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Time will soon define us. Keep holding on. Dawn is a slow van, an emergency tomorrow.
Forgive and Forget
I’ve listened to so much my body has to say
I couldn’t even see your view. It’s wild,
I’ve endorsed my own madness for myself.
These days, I’m always wanting the sunset
and peering at tomorrow from the borderline
but at my back are those yesterdays. I have
wanted life so much that I’ve forgotten to live
these few days, these few years that I didn’t
even know I had so much summer on my hand
all winter and autumn is just a block away
but here, I’m learning how to stay and stitch
these wrongs right but my hands are all
I’m left with—so much spring. Oh, so much spring.
Entrances Are for Exits
And some days we spit this beating heart out
(a dew on nature’s holy face) just to remind us
how it is to feel. I’m learning to draw a house.
The doors. I’m so good at the doors. I don’t know
if this, like life, is going or staying but these
futures have carried so much while they melt
into yesterday in events that leave the eyes
watery. I used to say too much until I couldn’t.
Our bodies are the distance between now and
tomorrow. Over there are worries arranged into
lifespans longer than yours. Have as much as you want.
But forget tomorrow, you’re not even living
in the present yet. You still haven’t chosen a ruin
to make of this life. You can have a new body
from the star’s dust. You can wish for everything
and nothing. You can have your nights to yourself.
You can drink the silver from the water-skinned moon
and take a beloved with you and back, you can
have a home with so many windows and no doors.
Oladejo Abdullah Feranmi, a black poet, won the 2024 Deconflating Surveillance with Safety poetry contest by Petty Propolis Inc. He was a finalist in the Hayden’s Ferry Review Poetry Prize and shortlisted in the Thomas Dylan Poetry contest. His work appears in publications like Paper Crane Journal’s ‘Outstanding Young Poets.
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Heavy Feather Review 