The blood beneath my skin

is white when you place it

under the white lights. 

I remember that January, its crisp touch of bright mist
Spreading. I remember Allen, his body a home we have
Just returned to, after hearing that dozens of mothers
Jumped off Third Mainland bridge into their children’s
Funeral. The elegies were inherited, almost lyrical that
The Newspapers clouded the day, full of listeners.
They did know he was an obsession, & we gathered
In semi-circles round what he once sang to me, eyes
Closed, dreaming, perhaps, of love, of a country he would
Be renamed The beautiful. Where he would stop by
The traffic lights to put into his guitar the sorrow he flags
In the open place of his birth; an expanse of colonies
Super-heavy with librettos performed by nations as soft
As water. I took a picture of the dead, do not forget this .
As if it was his pleasure to keep what belonged to my heart.
The dead, too, took a picture of me as I placed in his hands
A book full of petals the day they came upon the knowledge
Of my cheekbones, streaked with the glow of his lust
After the man I have been living: manic jazz, clubber,
Cinnamon-claimed boy from Ames. All I wanted
Was my gentle going, through the railroad, into a new night.

I do not listen to the news. Oftentimes, I come by it. I  listened. A slow but dreary voice, infected with contrition, cast it. The lady on the radio, not likely a broadcaster in the way her tone skipped and mellowed, sounded guilty. Perhaps, she felt it was an improper thing to do, bringing a horrible news to bear on the public. Of the few years I have come by news on the radio, I haven’t heard such voice as forlorn. Thereafter, I walked, remorseful, into my one-bedroom apartment, sat by the window and thought about all that have befallen a country I have been born  to become an émigré, always on my toes, with the urgency to leave. Only a few moments ago, a gay man was hacked down by the mob, and his mother was believed to have jumped into the lagoon to die. I recalled a number of events and said to myself, “Tares, there is no county here, just a collection of mobs. You must leave. Days later, after several attempts, and teary, I wrote Desire…

Tares Oburumu is the 2022 winner of the Sillerman prize for African Poets. His works have appeared in Connotation Press, Dawn Review, Icefloes International journal, Loch Review, and elsewhere.