Migration I – Rasheed Ayinla Shehu
Isn’t prayer a mirror of our lacks, our fears?
Mother and son observe the last ritual of departure:
the conviction that it might be another beautiful way
to name what makes her a widow; him, a fatherless child.
Guest Editors: Sarah Lubala and Logan February
Cover Design by Tochi Itanyi
As a writer and poet who calls themselves spiritual and maintains spiritual practices I hereby declare with outstretched arms, forehead to the belly of mother earth and wind as my ancestors that the literary bread of this work is ancestrally communal. The breadth, the ballad, the sonic structure of 20.35 Africa: Anthology of Contemporary Poetry Vol. VIII spans generations and defiantly plants itself in rich soiled pastures of won and lost kinship. Portals elevate rabbits to goddesses and cancers slow deaths to afterlives. Each poem kneels at the presence of heartbreak, severed umbilical cords or the knowing that can only be felt in the crux of a haibun’s prayer. Ase’. Every poem an intentional beaded work threaded by an omnipresent spell of words.
– Anastacia-Renee, Side Notes from the Archivist
Isn’t prayer a mirror of our lacks, our fears?
Mother and son observe the last ritual of departure:
the conviction that it might be another beautiful way
to name what makes her a widow; him, a fatherless child.
Some of us own the tyres
Some of us own the dashboard
The seats plus the seat belts!
Even the engine!
The brakes and accelerator, inclusive!
Just so you remember
always, we sing
odes to the participating ropes, odes to bodies climbing with stealth
family is willingness to be cured, pruned out with bloody hands
more theories on superposition, the logic of layering
after the war when i became this human
too wrecked for credit, wilting and in dire need of help
with a face of shame; its full material
my rambunctious descriptions of home within a house
I will live my death and kill my life. I, crater. I, liar. I, thief. From the crepuscular corners of my rotting mouth, I pus you. Glorify the bloated dead & poison & glue-board & trip-wire & cheese-trap & murder
at the sound of rain,
ants file out his eye sockets
like pupils, spilling.
On the news, they said there are dark places beyond the sea; deserts of silence, islands of suffocation, rooms bursting with the thirsty laughter of a dead humor. That harmattan the river took two girls
All the mercies that I received;
I remember. The tribal mark of a boy who chased his cashmere goats
to the cold hands of night to give me shelter looked like God.
the quiet intoxication / of abnegated passions / creates a sublime totality on velvet red rows / high above where laypeople sit / enjoying in spiritual revue / holding something honest / high, higher still / full of light / and god’s life.
you in the mirror and you together and do you fear it, the recognition in your pupils? the holiness in you? do you die, an insurmountable joy wells at calling and having had some grand answer?
the water of a bruised side victory
is mine but what is mine also runs after me
in naked hopeless streets
maybe salt is meant to be recycled
chased after as you lose yourself in the torrents
wrap your fingers around the emptiness long enough and you learn how to thread ropes from nothing
for every falling is still a chapter in the scoring of living and you might learn something out of it
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