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GRIEF WILL REMAKE YOU by Ernest Ogunyemi
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GRIEF WILL REMAKE YOU
by Ernest Ogunyemi
Grief Will Remake You – First Runner-up of the 2019 Kreative Diadem Annual Creative Writing Contest (Poetry Category)
“Grief will probably/ redraft your whole/ anatomy”
—Caroline Ebeid
I have just begun my walk out of dawn
& I have begun picking dead leaves.
I have never played so close to fire, but
hear, I know the language of been burnt.
my mother taught me, the taste of a live-coal
on a boy’s tongue, when she walked out of her body,
left it a snail shell. today, I forget the language of joy,
I forget how happiness grows into a sugary bird
filling every puff of cheek, nestling under the pave
of the tongue, hiding in the spaces between the teeth
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where god decided to let air in in seeps. it is the doing
of grief. how it will gift you a new tongue, or scrape clean
the one you knew; bland every bud that knows
sweetness; fill your mouth with a new song,
the way a Mother python fills a room-corner.
tell me, what is grief itself if not the remaking of a life?
how motherless boys are pushed into a life we never chose
burning wood & Maami’s cooking & the smell of grief’s spittle
from its latest fresh at your skin fills my nose like air.
rainwater & saltwater & the buttery taste of mucus on my tongue.
the rusty bunk bed, your fragile self pressed into its bosom.
here: the sword-edge sharp coldness of your eyes,
the wilt flowers in your hair, the after-rain quiet of your body.
something in my head whispers, this might be a joke.
death does not take people when their bodies begin
to green, when they’re in their most beautiful dresses—
does it?
when does it not?
I feel the pinky of grief on the nape of my neck, its touch
cold & warm like the welcoming of a new born & the burying
of its mother. the ants on my inside roam about, they pinch,
they want. a dead bird falls from my chest & ends at the floor
of my belly. the ants gather in its belly where some bees have honeyed.
a few minutes later, the ants roam again—just as I now
roam, my legs walking me to places somebody forgot to draw
on the map. the ants on my inside now bite; they bite
everything that has a name till everything that has a name forgets
its name—what is grief if not the unbottling of hunger?—
I forget my name, too. & I forget from
where I began walking into this new life.
GRIEF WILL REMAKE YOU
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ernest O. Ògúnyemí (b. 2000) is a writer from Nigeria. Some of his works have appeared/forthcoming in Acumen Poetry Journal, Ricochet Review, Litro Print Journal, Erotic Africa: The Sex Anthology, Lucent Dreaming, Low Light Magazine, Canvas Lit Journal, Agbowó, The Nigerian Poetry Anthology (Animal Heart Press), Polyphony Lit Mag, and elsewhere. A 2019 Adroit Summer Mentee, a 2019 COUNTERCLOCK Arts Collective Fellow, and a reader at Palette Poetry and a staff reader at COUNTERCLOCK Journal, he is curating the first Young African Poets Anthology, guest-edited by Nome Emeka Patrick and Itiola Jones. In 2019, he got a mini-grant to Kickstart a literary outfit dedicated solely to young African creatives. When he is not reading a book of short stories or watching the birds flying in the sky, dreaming, you can find him on Twitter @ErnestOgunyemi.
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