A muezzin's call breaks into this body/ dips my tongue into a Diwan's chorus/ In this room/ scripts of litanies pile high/ I pull a local blade from its cracked wall/ sharpen it against a cornerstone/ and reshape the edges of my tribal marks:/ the magnetic metals calling hearts into submission/ I fill the cracks with nine flower roots each/ where nails of fear were once drilled/ where owls and bats once nested/ This room once had a furnace/ Sometimes I assemble fish and bush meat over its fire:/ a reinvention of furnace into a fireplace/ into a kitchen/ into a beauty salon/ Beauty is not the object sitting on the canvass of my mirror/ beauty is the smile on my face/ redressing grief/ opening floodgates for bees to deposit their nectars/ for serenade and aubade/ Some nights/ I was the fuel igniting the fire burning me/ I was the pain across my windowpane–/ a blur dispelling its credence before the morning drizzle did the wiper/ Today, I befriend miracle / I am a magic/ I hold water and warmth/ Sometimes I go into prostration to worship my body/ God is not that jealous/ He had created man in His own image/ I am picking stones and crumbs of bean pods/ separating and shifting beans/ Who is cutting onions? / This body is burning/ but its smoke is of incense/ This room / is a make-up kit/ & this poem is the grip of goldsmith/ fanning the fire of my comeliness/ [The title is a Twitter caption by Adedayo Agarau for a short video clip of himself, posing.]
Taofeek “Aswagaawy” Ayeyemi is a Nigerian lawyer, writer and author of the chapbook Tongueless Secrets (Ethel Press, 2021) and a collection “aubade at night or serenade in the morning” (Flowersong Press, 2021). A BotN and Pushcart Prize Nominee, his works have appeared or forthcoming in Contemporary Verse 2, Lucent Dreaming, Ethel-zine, Up-the-Staircase Quarterly, FERAL, ARTmosterrific, Banyan Review, tinywords, the QuillS and elsewhere. He won the 2021 Loft Books Flash Fiction Competition, emerged 2nd Place in the 2021 Porter House Review Poetry Contest, and an Honorable Mention in the 2021 Ito En Oi Ochai Shin-Haiku Contest, the 2021 Oku-no-hosomichi Soka Matsubara Haiku Contest and the 2020 Stephen A. DiBiase Poetry Prize among others. He is @Aswagaawy on Twitter
