(cover photograph direction: David Obi)
(Praise for Samuel Adeyemi’s Anti-funeral)
Today everything is beautiful
You will read the entirety of this poem in disbelief,
as a driver
speeds around the bend searching for redemption.
There’s no grief on the hill.
Let’s bask in the sun.
Watch me terraform into a rainbow
Here, I ignore my mother’s
ghost till it dissolves into thin air.
A black boy, too
can dream of elation.
My lover says I smell like candour
I shift the napalm under
the bed — further away from my gasoline guilt.
My father, too, puts down his gun — his little boy
almost made him proud.
I am proof that night never lasts
forever & if you pray long enough, dusk
arrives with a few blessings.
There was something before this
limbo & longing but don’t dwell on that,
I come from a bullet & I promise
I’m innocent so long as you don’t give me a name.
I, too, can hold a body & not
make it a corpse. Can hold a hand
& let it just be that.
Not everything I kiss requires a miracle — I am
capable of so much more than ruin.
