top of page

At the sunset of my suffering,

Ìfẹ́olúwa Àyàndélé

—after Louise Glück


there was an open window,

I remember: January, with its 


dry-cold, hanged on the hinge 

of the window pane & it becomes

a slender sun that flickered


into my past. It is tragic to survive 

as a memory, shoveled down into the mind 

of people. Memory is the thing 


I cannot own, love—

my suffering is how songs become

a cloud of vapor—a passage into the other 


world. The hinges of my life are a cistern 

of sadness, carved into a labyrinth of love 

or else, like growing chrysanthemum.


Ìfẹ́olúwa Àyàndélé is from Tede, Nigeria. He is an MFA candidate in Poetry at Florida State University. His work is nominated for The Pushcart Prize and the Best of the Net. His work is published in Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora, Another Chicago Magazine, The South Carolina Review, Stonecoast Review, Moon City Review, Noctua Review, The McNeese Review, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, Cider Press Review, Harbor Review, Rattle, Verse Daily, and elsewhere. He presently lives in Tallahassee, Florida.

bottom of page