Seamstress of Bandages
I cannot eliminate desire
Like monks can but I can blunt my
Self in other ways in daily ritual before I
Emerge to you. Perhaps this
Is what my absent grandfather was up to―
Sanding himself down in his room.
A gray trickle was all they could hear.
His son, disdaining this silk, was iron,
Knuckle ringing in the streets.
His mother, seamstress of
Bandages made soot faster to
Cushion their walls.
But these things skip a
Generation. I blunt myself anyway, & for this,
Tie one arm behind me, bind four fingers of the other to
Weaken my sword, hew
Sinkholes beneath the mountain
To rub his iron from my
Blood; allow underground razor streams
To oxidize me warp me soft
Into a rust rubble, and tan embrace.
In this gamble for
Buoyancy I grind down the
Bullets inscribed with his sin.
I do not grate him with my guns
I find a goaded stream,
An oxbow lake to carve us into
Saxophones holding still,
Our pangolin desire.
Terraforming
We are becoming a memory of ourselves―
obelisk cast in clay from downstairs up. Old
Chuck had the truth of it―
our death is strung in fragments, an ascending
paralysis taking the toes first but while
I have arms still can I
wrest this thing down?
We hurry because we feel the ebb
of life and land is a blockchain of violence,
matchstick house for climbing vines.
Prune it with chisel pencils,
tailor-measure the machine of hope nightly to save the air
but forest will not be denied― the grate will not keep it out forever.
And if we sacrifice with arson in the grove, wishing martini-glass
rain in a last belch of green,
were we ever here?
Only a few madmen hark in the streets.
It is impolite
to say aloud
the thing we all think.
Grove
In black light
the forest is an eyewhite fishbone grave,
we are bleached and all-pupil in its dark
and the curtains of the world do not hush
the dialtone traffic.
In black light
I asked for a diviner,
and one asked why I was sad.
I was,
when I looked.
You’re molting, said another,
and I did,
when I looked.
Tolu Oloruntoba was born in Ibadan, Nigeria, and practiced medicine before his current work. Some of his recent poetry can be found in Pleiades, Columbia Journal Online, Obsidian, SAND Journal, and elsewhere. His chapbook, “Manubrium,” will be published by Anstruther Press in summer 2019. He lives in Metro Vancouver.
