Tipton Poetry Journal – Winter 2022
Speculum Ayomide Bayowa I offered an empty grace palm on a Sunday sermon prayer with an open eye. My mother nodded away a lizard dance & her pious dough, just as she’d to my immediate father's cracked mirror, all day and night— the way she already shoved the satisfaction box of every man. As learnt— that which chases a woman from a man to another: asylum not strumpetry— the same drive for new church members. Rough-handed givers, hardening their faiths on their Naira notes, burdening the ushers with after-service palm straightening monotony. Heavens straightened whenever a young man became her sanctuary. She whistled my head, a kettle placed to her hot chest and chanted in five tongues— one of which is a quick nuptial layout. That was how I was birthed: ‘…from stutters to the littlest of chance given to a stranger.’ The long-heard first words that brought light into her blindfolded heart. She wore a tall cerulean miniskirt— tall and lined as our front room’s curtain. Or short as her thigh flesh, herding the doddery of a just found age-is-mere-number sheep in a famine field. Every time she thought the color of my eyes was her rose’s first choice, things started to tear: the Leukemia clouds losing their cotton in drifting wools, as I chased to catch up her moving boat in a fragment question of that which claimed to have come through the backdoor in peace and to stay— with a booster bag and barrel-shaped forehead.
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