Fatihah Quadri Eniola
Image by Christina Deravedisian from Unsplash
Portrayal of bodies in lockdown
we moved from a house into the next/ gambrel sloped on each side/ keeping
refugee-birds from the arrest of the season/ i hate calls of mockingbirds because in my dreams/
they die & return as cruel things/ before the hut, the sky is wearing a red cloth
& here is your mother’s mouth reaching for the edge of what's unseen/ of
what a man cannot interpret in the language of holiness/ the garden is a graveyard of flowers’
burnt bodies & we/ boys on stained shirts of awareness/ acting what it
means to be lavaliere glinting a million lights but reality is a jailhouse/
the city puts on a torn blanket of security/ the field dances naked/ exposing boys to the
cloudburst of bullets/ at the intersection of the house/ a woman like
my mother wraps me into her loneliness & we listen to footfalls of the approaching night
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Born on a Friday in December, Fatihah Quadri Eniola is a young African Poet. Her work has appeared in literary journals like Ice floe, The Shallow Tales Review, The Kalahari and elsewhere. She is nyctophobic and lives with a very cute cat, Honiy. She is an active fellow on Twitter @FatihahQuadri.
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