ISSN: 1941-4137
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
Bola Opaleke is a Pushcart Prize-nominated poet. His poems have appeared or forthcoming in a few Journals like Frontier Poetry, Rising Phoenix Review, Writers Resist, Rattle, Cleaver, One, The Nottingham Review, The Puritan, The Literary Review of Canada, Sierra Nevada Review, Dissident Voice, Poetry Quarterly, The Indianapolis Review, Canadian Literature, Empty Mirror, Poetry Pacific, Drunk Monkeys, Temz Review, The Pangolin Review, and others. He holds a degree in City Planning and lives in Winnipeg MB.
Poets Resist
Edited by Jemshed Khan
May 21, 2019
Edited by Jemshed Khan
May 21, 2019
A Pattern Too Familiar
Today, humanity is again being pushed off
the cliff, in our country. These folks have started
talking about bodies the same way they talk about dirty clothes.
On the hill, they say: "beat the dust out of them, leave them
in the washer". Isn't that how the politicians want your bodies
stacked? To scissor them into shapes drawn by uncut precepts?
Isn't that how they poke your memory with fountain pens
the way a fisherman trawls for pickerel in weedy ponds?
You ask: why are these people so ensorcelled by thievery?
I say: because when they knocked you off your toboggan
they received a long, silent applause for it. Have you ever had
a stranger in your car forcing you to drive with a gun to your head?
Imagine how many scary stories they can weave
with such serpentine drift having created a tongue, salted
to confuse you with sweetness. Imagine how fast a black moon
becomes a liquid butterfly that must not be removed
once it landed on your skin. Can you recall how in high school
your best friend said he wanted to, one day, be a Senator
two minutes after he’d told you "bodies are created
to be owned"? & by that he meant yours? Can you recall
how offensive it was to say the same of him? These men have
built a graveyard for their words on your body.
The gorge widened as their language transforms
into a bandwagon of poachers on your own tongue. Partisan
eyes tend to cluster in this country just to dissect
your womb the way a fisher's hook dissects the skeleton
of water. You extirpated a stomp of their teeth from your flesh,
unsurprised as another rose in its place. I wonder
if all slaveries begin like this: a stranger pointing the gun
to your head; your car loaded with goods you cannot refuse to deliver.
Poets Resist is published by Glass Poetry Press.
All contents © the author.
All contents © the author.
