Ìfẹ́olúwa Àyàndélé
Image by Jilbert Ebrahimi from Unsplash
Ìfẹ́olúwa Àyàndélé is from Tede, Nigeria. He is an MFA candidate at Florida State University. His work is nominated for The Pushcart Prize and the Best of the Net. His work is published in Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora, Another Chicago Magazine, The South Carolina Review, Stonecoast Review, Moon City Review, Noctua Review, The McNeese Review, Cider Press Review, Harbor Review, Rattle, Verse Daily and elsewhere. He presently lives in Tallahassee, Florida.
My Grandfather is a House
My grandfather is a house whose walls
are plastered with his ashes. I find him
fighting with the ghost of the civil war
in three rooms. His living room is the moving
pictures on TV, with flashes of falling soldiers
and their rifles buried in the soil. On his ceiling,
rats make holes in his soldier’s uniform
and the holes form maps, places he couldn’t
cross its borders. His bedroom houses cracked
mirrors and mattresses for ghosts taking a nap
after their journeys. I stand before the mirrors,
and my tomorrow is a cracked wall. The bedroom
is my grandfather’s grave and I see my grave
in my grandfather’s and the house is our graveyard.
I’m the white owl at the head of his tombstone,
reminiscing how his yesterday becomes ashes
and his pictures on the wall are the ruin of the glory
he brought home after the war, and the tree behind
the house is a city of fallen mangoes,
a city of rampaging houseflies, and I’m
at the seaside in Panama City, picking seashells,
picking fishbones, picking my grandfather’s bones
that the tides throw at my feet.
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