JUNE 2025, POETRY
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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.