by Tajudeen Muadh
after Adesiyan pelumi
” I write my name on my palm because when I die, I’ll be recognized” – palestine kid.
in a refugee camp, a boy’s body is a grave of things that exterminates his sanity. in the falsetto on his cracked tongue. in the reflections of his bones poising on the poems traipsing back to his body. he carries his existence into a cadaver of broken things– broken picture, broken body, broken portrait of a father outstripped by the sound of a bullet, broken sister learning to charge her body for panegyrics.
grief is another language that exorcises his body, his colour and his dream. water is the aftertaste of dreaming to live, and to live means to wait for another bomb to drown him.
Tajudeen Muadh is a young poet from Osun State, Nigeria, he’s long listed for the bkpw in 2021, he has works featured or forthcoming in different literary magazines and journals such as, Kalahari review, African poetry magazine, brittle paper, meniscus journal, decolonial passage and elsewhere.