Trying to be the volume
In a perforated space.
Water and raffia basket,
Cigarette smoke to air.
Candlelit dinners and
Moonless night dancing,
Bottomless virgin mojitos
And empty clear glasses.
Canine deities, revel in love
Too. They lap at shedding fur
Tracing the edges of lust,
With their slobbering
mouths, full of desire.
Would it not satisfy you
To bite, not bark?
To bare an aching tongue
Instead of plunging fangs.
When I lap your neck,
It tastes of brimstone.
Yet it begs to be put out
By a few laps or more.
But when two consuming fires
Meet—tongue tracing tongue—
Within a dense forest, where words
Gather only in fractured verse.
When one fire flickers with restraint,
And the other burns in wild eulogy.
The weaker will be swallowed whole
And a ball of vengeance shall sweep across
The forest floor, like an eleventh plague.
And after it has had its fill of the
Guilty and the innocent,
It will tunnel through the
Fractured verses, and
Mushroom to the heavens.
And all that was or
Could have been,
Becomes a charred rendition of
The Resurrection Symphony.

Aanuoluwapo Adesina is a Nigerian poet and writer. He currently serves as Founder and Editor of The Olugbon Review— a literary and art magazine created to curate the unheard voices and unseen crafts of young writers and artists without a platform of their own or mainstream exposure. He is a graduate of the Creative Writing MFA program at Butler University, Indiana. His works have appeared in Brittle Paper, ROPES Literary Journal, Kalahari Review, and elsewhere. He enjoys writing, bowling, and taking walks in his leisure.