Art
by Oladejo Abdullah Feranmi
The rain and the tears and other things falling without hitting the ground and your stomach hungry with grief eating everything and your heart and all that is left to eat is yourself, but time keeps spinning you to the moment you spawn prayers and loved them behind their backs and after their leaving you still cannot see their face nor stomach everything time serves in a variety of years. But you couldn’t eat until you became insatiable and melted into the clouds and learn its silence and the culture of drifting away when the storm comes. And that is holy, counting few winters into your blood hoping tomorrow’s prayer can hold you until sunshine but tomorrow is for the needy so you poem it all today like a god of your hand and its emptiness, but you wriggled anyway and waved between goodbye and goodnight.
Oladejo Abdullah Feranmi, a black poet, won the 2024 Deconflating Surveillance with Safety poetry contest by Petty Propolis Inc. He was a finalist in the Hayden’s Ferry Review Poetry Prize and shortlisted in the Thomas Dylan Poetry contest. His work appears in publications like Paper Crane Journal’s Outstanding Young Poets.