First conversation with Ọya in a millennium, Ṣàngó’s
             voice is crystalline as the Niger River before the oil spill. Spatial
             audio trimming the edges of his fire-laced verbs. Ọya’s tears

             of joy pour through
             a wormhole, & rains

                                              the first drops of the great flood
                                              on the roof of Noah’s ark. & in
                                a coetaneous reality douses fire in a nuke before

                        it draws its breath. Sweet ambrosia water springing
           dates & apricots in the razed fields again.

Give up what you guessed about asteroids, darling.
             Lightning flashes only because the god of thunder

kisses his lover. Tornadoes & wild storms brew
              in obeisance to the weather goddess, untying

her adire wrapper. Rainbows, a testament to gravitons
             pairing the moist of her mouth to the flame in his breath.
                          Hue inherent in the nexus of aqua & blaze. In a mirror

                          multiverse, my father is learning to love my mother
right. A thousand years in retrospect, even Aláàfin’s palace

                                        charred in red smoke.

                         Ọba olúkòso \ Ọba olúkòso \ Ọba olúkòso

Even the king a god beholds
              death & turns back.

                                                              Ọba olú’òpaokùso
                                                 At a restaurant in the year 2350,

they order steamy àmàlà, gbègìrì & ewédú. Ṣàngó’s
                            double-bladed ọṣé powers the buka, & restores the light

                            in my mother’s eyes. Ọya’s holo

             gram shares bio-digital breaths with Ṣàngó, XD lips communing
in the bright silence. & the resulting thunderstorm
            s p l i t s

                                      Jonah’s ship & my parents conjugal

ties in halves.

Mu’izz Ọpẹ́yẹmí Àjàyí (Frontier XVIII) is the Editor-in-Chief of Nigeria Review, Asst. Curator of Poetry Column-NND, and a 2023 Poetry Translation Centre UNDERTOW fellow. He won the Lagos-London Poetry Competition 2022 and University of Ibadan Law LDS Poetry Prize 2022. He features in Splinter, Frontier Poetry, Chestnut Review, Olongo, Lolwe, SAND, Poetry Wales, & elsewhere.

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