Drowning
Ìfẹ́olúwa Àyàndélé
—for Kayode
My heart is carrying the atlas of the world
on its shoulders on a rainy June day.
The roof of my room is leaking & each droplet of rain
falls bare into my face. I’m the boy who lost his father
in Lagos while studying faraway in Ohio State. The sky
is crying tonight & I have got no bowl to fetch its tears.
The tears are becoming a pool of trauma
& my heart is drowning in this pool. I don’t
want to float in this noisy pool. But I can’t breathe
under these waters & I can’t see a rainbow. How can
I be the bird in the eye of the rainbow if my eyes are blurred?
I can’t see any color but rain.rain.rain. I am running
in the rain, away from a home, away from fractured
memories of my father & away from colors of grief choking my lungs,
choking my shoulder girdles that carry the weight of the world,
bringing me to woods of smashed blackberries
& upturned roots after a thunderstorm.
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.