Emptying
Emptying
by Ayobami Adesina
I’m at this juncture where everything connects
but life
I gather myself so many poems only the living can’t understand
I write of love and how it broke a boy into living metaphors
How love is another name for emptying
I emptied my lover’s body before the storm came and took her teeth
I write of the heat that made us flee from our body
from our silence
How I break a communion with solitude and thoughts and plenty plenty silence
I write of how a girl yawned and the whole house went in and died
The lines in her thought are the wars her family never saw
The news comes up and a boy still dies — another is running from this wreck
but stumbles and die
His mouth is heavy as what broke this country
and me…