Seun Fakoyede
Seun Fakoyede is a Nigerian writer and School Teacher. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in TriQuarterly, Puerto Del Sol, Going Down Swinging (Pigeonholed), Slice Magazine, Bacopa Literary Review, Third Point Press, Stoneboat and Vinyl Poetry.
To escape bad memory
water doesn’t attach or fasten to a surface,
you cannot pin it on a door like quit notice.
water doesn’t want anything to memorize.
i keep thinking: if i could nation into mode
of water i’d flow through the briefest door.
water lets go or drowns out any heaviness.
if i’d own anything, it’ll be non-stick palms.
nothing should be run near a body to stick
to the skin, not the white shadow of a ring
that’s now been removed from a marriage,
not a wristwatch’s tan line curtly metering
what’s irretrievable, from tomorrow’s skin.
not a Bindi on the temple of a boy. fashion
on a clean frown. my thumb approximates
a hole in my mama’s ear from her earrings
because absence may be tracked, touched.
absence’s a place you’d go so you couldn’t
walk back, the only place absence touches
you are all these places you aim to harden.
ma said i’m the only one who doesn’t look
like her. on her expression i’m still missing.
her smile so scenic it’s the atlas to find me.
on the atlas our country’s always together.
there’d been no war & no one remembers
hunger. flowers first on scene of a finished
war mimics blood by putting on a red gear.
this implies flowers have memories of war,
they keep it with their petals. a knife stays
outside a skin, because to enter costs a lot.
because liquid let out cannot enter back in.
to build an entry, we must build an escape
or it’ll be prison, there’ll be no walking out.
a body can memorize the entries of knives,
& may forget to heal after the knives leave.
water opens its skin, remembers to shut it.
it muffles the calls of what’s put in its belly
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