Poetry by Bola Opaleke

​​ELECTION NIGHT

The music of freedom makes my lips
move slowly to its silent song –
an incantation switched in my head

as ordinary poem.

Each time a doctor says tumor I hear "tuber",
& immediately think of a knife & a naked fire,
since that’s how the rich get fed in my country,

cutting me in halves, probing.

​The idea here is to find what part
of me is hurtful? What part is hurting?
But do I even know myself well enough

to know what door

or window on my body never closes to pain?
A shadow is as present as the object that owns it.
But, of all the recycled truths about my body

I believe the one that calls me
a doll; because I cannot tell the taste
of my own name or the smell
of my old grief. So tonight,

I am just a tuber of yam

under the surgeon’s flashlight,
wondering about many other things unclothed –
a naked incantation interpreted as a poem.




SEE MISSISSIPPI WITH FOLDED ARMS
       because he says slavery was a choice


After we have renamed every river in the land
after the farmer that made his dog his god

we proceeded to burning the boats
that brought a people we called slaves –
sea trucks become bodies becomes ashes

become dust. Wailing voices violently vanished,

become air droplets. Disappearance makes
its tiny appearance. But we know fire can only polish
metals, polish shackles. When we heard the songs

of the lonely paloverdes, because they too have known
the brutal betrayal of the sea, we vomited sunsets

through our ears. & here, we got confused –

we got uploaded to the newer version of slavery
that ensures our signatures appear across our faces.

Are we not the ones tending to the ships?
Are we not the ones charged with renaming things?
Are we not the proud collectors of a people with no names?

We, the renamed – the ashes, the dust, the wailing voices.




SOME PEOPLE THINK DEATH IS ONLY FOR THE POOR
but what hell would it be called when the church turn away sinners?


each side of grief I bit was softer
than my bones softer than the flower
that grows inside the loneliness
that would not let me leave, or die.

death comes in different colors, strangely
I chose the one that strikes only unbaptized eyes.

isn't this how modernization romances immigration
& no one remembers? no one also remembers
how civilization built so many roads on the roaring sea
without which the entire mankind would vanish

into a thick smoke; her toned, greasy body evanescenced.
we know the dead sing better than the living

though we're too deaf to hear it. I pluck every sadness
in my head, make sure its darkness is well lit
in the name of a country that pulls travelers
from the sea and burns off their boats,

each of their pockets emptied of silver and gold.
the side of grief I bit is softer than the cries

of babies forcefully orphaned. no name rises
for the horror of death that looms. they say no such death
exists when, in fact, death comes in different shapes
and soon, they too, would choose the one that broke loose

from hell. one man unable to hold the hand of another
would ask "what unkindness brought us here?"

it rained inside my body and my country dissolves in its flood.

​

Bola is a Pushcart Prize-nominated poet. His poems have appeared or forthcoming in a few Journals like Frontier Poetry, Rising Phoenix Review, Writers Resist, Rattle, Cleaver, One, The Nottingham Review, The Puritan, The Literary Review of Canada, Sierra Nevada Review, Dissident Voice, Poetry Quarterly, The Indianapolis Review, Canadian Literature, Empty Mirror, Poetry Pacific, Drunk Monkeys, Temz Review, St. Peters College(University of Saskatchewan) Anthology (Society 2013 Vol. 10), Pastiche Magazine, and others. He holds a degree in City Planning and lives in Winnipeg MB.  www.bolaopaleke.com

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