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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