Abdulbasit Oluwanishola is a young Nigerian poet who writes from Ilorin, Kwara State. He’s studying Agriculture at Usmanu Dafodiyo University Sokoto.
Portrait of a Broken Home
Carry the night & you are lost.
—AbdulRazaq Salihu
The day your sister carried the shadow &
darkness ripened in her eyes,
you knew that happiness is a sonorous
song for a broken home—because, music is a climate for mood; the blueish & the brownish moments.
She became
the fragments of luck. of air. became
an abdomen— unseen.
a needle in the bank of a river— lost.
Many times your father set his eyes on
your sister’s portrait,
he vanishes into thin air. What is memory
if not a parasite for its host?
Imagine a small, brown house, empired by
darkness like wormhole— your home
become a termitariun for grief.
Darkness is dust, it stretches its hands through your home.
Turn
your father to hen’s leg. your
mother to sheep. & you, her napkin.
Isn’t grief a metonymy for hard drugs?
home, to you, is an exile. & the
soothing place to bear remedy is in regret—
that is your home.
Isn’t regret a synonym for lateness?
Darkness is blind.
How do you expect
a hungry man to dress?
a dampy dawn to look, if not like dusk?
But, fire, too, beholds light. So, many times, you seek a home— break, into light,
into the stream, into the world.
Contributor’s Bio
Abdulbasit Oluwanishola is a young Nigerian poet who writes from Ilorin, Kwara State. He’s studying Agriculture at Usmanu Dafodiyo University Sokoto. His works are up/forthcoming on Arts Lounge, Synchronized Chaos, AlMiraatuh, Suburban Witchcraft, Beyond the veil press, Troublemaker Firestarter, CultureCult Press, Queer Toronto Literary Magazine, Doublespeak Magazine
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