Three Poems

by Romeo Oriogun

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Exile

There’s a place I was given,
A horse with its broken legs.
Lord, I tend to this brief thing called life like a man
Caring for a beast that eats what it loves.
I can’t help this loneliness of people walking away from my eyes,
It is how a city knows its walls are fallen.
The plane breaks through the clouds & San Juan comes into view,
This city shall survive this water, I say.
Once I knew where my circle was in the world,
I could walk into forests with just a book & find my way
Back to my mother’s chest.
I should tell you my mother’s chest was a tree, beside it a flower
Blossomed & was called grace,
I should tell you I once saw the river drowned a bone
& sung it to sleep, maybe this is death,
Maybe this is a mother’s body welcoming a son.
The driver says welcome & I know he means stranger,
I know he means what drives you into the world.
I have come here to find what I’d lost but it will spit me out,
A seed floating on water, a boat, a life
Without the luck of trees.
The city stretches into a fort, as if it is still ready for war,
As if a battle ship sits eternally before her eyes.
I have known this fear, it is called reaching into the future for the cut,
Meaning I still see the men who called me homo, meaning dirt,
Meaning sin, meaning their hands shall divide my body into a barren field.
I once woke up to the beast in my chest cage,
I held it tenderly before severing its neck.
My therapist called it a sacrifice, meaning I saw the blood even in the dark,
I smelt it & knew home drowned last night.
Father, here is what I was given, a goat, the beauty to walk back to the knife,
The man saying grace as if blood isn’t pure enough
& this city. Here at night, I will walk into anything that call me home
& it will hold me for a while. I’ve seen my mother’s bed this way,
The burgundy color of the bedsheets, the walls with old photographs,
Her skin. Here my mother is alive, she’s my city
& I hold her close. Mother, stay with me for a while,
Stay before the sea comes to wash us clean of our thirst.

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All Things Holy

 

i  Something died in the field

The first time I saw death was in the body of a little chicken.
Like any being full of love I tried to give it life,
I tried to sing it till its little voice rise from the darkness of its throat
& father said this is weakness, to cling to what is gone.
I saw the world moved with time,
What wept was swept away, everything was consumed
As they should be,
And in the evening of my life the truth fell like a dead bird.
What we can’t give life, we can give a grave.
I took its wings and offered it to God.
There’s a prayer that embraces the dark
And when I opened the ground, I laid it there,
I laid the chicken into the keeper of everything holy.
As the day became night, I turned to face the living.
What truth is bigger than the earth?

 

ii   Sacrament

Here’s the urn with its body wrapped by angels,
Here’s the litany of every bleeding hand,
Here’s a father breaking a son’s body into bread,
Here’re seven halleluiahs.
Here’s the dark, here’s blood,
Here’s the ashes, here’s red wine, here’s my body learning sacrifice
Is another name for pain, for the whip, for the water
Breaking out of eyes, for silence, for knife cuts,
For wailing, for waiting, for hymns,
For the prayers still lost beneath sea.
Isn’t this what it means to offer a body to God,
To watch fire cleanse it till it’s holy enough
To sit beneath the father.
The bread is eaten. Blessed be the body.
Blessed be what finds life through loneliness. Amen.

 

iii.   Sacrifice.

In the dark I stretched my hand
And found no lineage to call upon.
I thought I was not capable of being loved because I was queer,
Because a son’s face chose a mother, isn’t this what plagues us?
Even in the depth of our pain
we offer excuse to what is not whole enough to love us.
The locust is not merciful to the field,
Knowing what it destroys is incapable of forgetting its wings.
I watched you call me, not for the first time,
The harvest was rich, fattened, and ripe enough to call you father,
And this is the curse of standing too close to the circle.
I was the one your hand touched, the one made holy enough
To know sacrifice is holding pain for a God.
I have asked the night to bury a story.
At the grocery shop a woman in a yellow blouse
Stopped in the middle of an aisle and began dancing.
Every stranger has taught me how to love this world,
Every goodbye has taught me what can’t give us love
Is worthy of being buried.
Father, sand is falling into the grave.

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My Tinder Date Speak of Fruits

I have never been afraid to place a bowl of fruits on the tongue of a river. If this is how a son pleases a mother, then call me good, call me the light that refuse the allure of the night. My Goddess is what inhabits the bottom of the sea, say this is a better way to hide. The girl behind the wheels laughed when she spoke of queer boys, she said Haiti knows how to kill boys that are too soft, she said on D Street here in Boston Fruits walk with swinging buttocks, all they want is a man for the night, she said why are you not laughing. The boy at the back began a story with the broken bones of queer boys. He said, at Atlanta we beat up some fruits the night we had some rum at the club, we fucked them up, we say be gay but don’t slice through the day to show us. I opened a hole in his back to bring out my mouth. I’m Bisexual and Black, I was born between two cities in a river without language. When my aunt speaks to me on the phone, her voice sounds like a translation. I am without proverbs to be Yoruba. I am without cowries to be Benin. What hides me is what pushes me away. I envy everything with a home. Do you know the best death is by a door. At least what doesn’t call you son will bury you. So, what are you she asked, a banana or a tomato tossed to the roadside? What I am is an empty body, a song without a sound, I own no place to call love. In church the pastor said heaven is home for whoever throws the first stone, meaning God sanctioned the cutlass to know the thirst of blood, meaning every son disowned for what shouts under his skin is without God. In everywhere I’m called sin, I seek to be free. Before Brookline she dropped me by the road side, gave me the finger and drove away. I turned to the wind, to what is without form and this too is how the earth becomes home for a body creating a room from every rejected breath.

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Romeo Oriogun is the author of The Origin of Butterflies, selected by Kwame Dawes for the APBF New-Generation African Poets Chapbook Series. His poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Connotation Press, and others. He was the 2017 winner of the Brunel International African Poetry Prize, a fellow of the Ebedi International Writers Residency and currently a Du Bois Fellow and an IIE-APF Fellow at Harvard University.