At the sunset of my suffering,

Ìfẹ́olúwa Àyàndélé

—after Louise Glück

there was an open window,

I remember: January, with its

dry-cold, hanged on the hinge

of the window pane & it becomes

a slender sun that flickered

into my past. It is tragic to survive

as a memory, shoveled down into the mind

of people. Memory is the thing

I cannot own, love—

my suffering is how songs become

a cloud of vapor—a passage into the other

world. The hinges of my life are a cistern

of sadness, carved into a labyrinth of love

or else, like growing chrysanthemum.

Ìfẹ́olúwa Àyàndélé is from Tede, Nigeria. He is an MFA candidate in Poetry at Florida State University. His work is nominated for The Pushcart Prize and the Best of the Net. His work is published in Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora, Another Chicago Magazine, The South Carolina Review, Stonecoast Review, Moon City Review, Noctua Review, The McNeese Review, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, Cider Press Review, Harbor Review, Rattle, Verse Daily, and elsewhere. He presently lives in Tallahassee, Florida.

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