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Drowning

Ìfẹ́olúwa Àyàndélé

          —for Kayode



My heart is carrying                     the atlas of the world

on its shoulders                             on a rainy June day. 

The roof of my room is               leaking & each droplet of rain 


falls bare into my face.               I’m the boy who lost his father

in Lagos while studying faraway in Ohio State. The sky

is crying tonight         & I have got no bowl to fetch its tears.


The tears are becoming              a pool of trauma

& my heart is drowning                in this pool. I don’t

want to float in this noisy pool. But I can’t breathe 


under      these waters & I can’t see a rainbow. How can 

I be the bird in the eye of the rainbow if my eyes      are blurred? 

I can’t see any color but               rain.rain.rain. I am running


in the rain, away from                    a home, away from fractured  


memories of my father & away from colors of grief choking my lungs,

choking my shoulder girdles      that carry the weight of the world,

bringing me to woods of smashed blackberries 


& upturned roots after a thunderstorm. 


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.

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