bewailing my homeland following the afternoon winter cold’s porous bites— an unrehearsed badass sip of the same smoke I puff from a tart cigarette’s butt. A flock of nanny blatted forward with unsymmetrical horns to dig out, collect and mourn the remains of their remains secreted in the corners of my mouth, the abyss of my larynx. The grief dished their bellies like the chords chewed when kneading my mother’s dough. In common, we’ve got eyes in widths of suppressed tears, heroes-past vaporised into emerald anthems sung to unroll tombs & summon away chimneys’ dark clouds produce. & Now that I could tell the cause of the uneventful faces I see in the flock patterns of birds flying by the overhead powerlines, I mellow picking faeces deposits of stray pets or fallen birds with my ashy hands. My girl, just back from school— shadowy, curled-up in claws like a painstaking kitty, joins me with a sac & oversize glove & asks to teach her how to bury things with wings and dreams. To name the fallen after a homeland, looking up & out for overhead drones, escape planes or curses— while digging, composing anthems in flagging synecdoche.
Ayomide Bayowa
is an award-winning Nigerian-Canadian filmmaker, writer and theatre artist. He is the (2021-24) poet laureate of Mississauga, Ontario, Canada. He set off 2018, as a long list of the Nigerian Students Poetry Prize, shortlist of the Eriata Oribabhor Poetry Prize (EOPP) plus the Christopher Okigbo Interuniversity Poetry Prize (which he was also a shortlist in 2019). He was the winner of the 2020 July Open Drawer Poetry Contest, the June/ July 2021 Edition of the Bi-monthly Brigitte Poirson Poetry Contest (BPPC), and evolved the second place in the On-Spot Poetry Writing Contest, 2019, as well as a top-ten gold entrant of the 9th Open Eurasian Literary Festival, United Kingdom. Bayowa was the first runner-up of the University of Toronto’s Elly-In-Action Poetry Prize (2021), a long list of the 2021 Adroit Prize for Poetry, plus semi-finalist of the 2021 Cave Canem Poetry Prize. He became the second place in the 2021 K. Valerie Connor Poetry Prize (Student Category) and clutched the third position in the Arojah Students Playwrighting Prize’s maiden edition with his play titled, “Recyclable Chairs.” He has appeared in a long list of literary magazines some of which are Beyond Words, Barren Magazine, Agbowó, Guesthouse-Lit, Stone of Madness Press. He is the Editor-in-Chief of Echelon Poetry, Canada, and currently reads poetry for Adroit Journal.
