Soft Haibun
It begins with love, I tell you— Romeo OriogunEverything begins somewhere, somehow, and ends somewhere, somehow.
But for its season goes on and on. Your mouth, heavy with a cold tale, you could go
on and on about burning songs. Like a ring. Like blood through vessels.
You learnt about the intimacy of death at your cousin S’ exit. The same day
Your brother struck twenty-five. That cold night. It returned again. The episode.
That cruel illness no one in the family christened. Only this time to last a lifetime.
No more slipping between worlds. That wicked sleep. Yes, you cried but how
much?
Enough to force breath back into a quiet body? Enough to bring time to a standstill?
Even the magazines and journals will not forget to send their rejection mails.
Na who send you? You supposed know by now say the world no send you.
The day will open again like a petal and everyone will wash their dishes
and press their clothes and bring bread to their longing mouth. Everyone will
return to plough the field. And an uncle will be taken again.
Black suits and black gowns
at the mouth of a grave…
A soft wind passes
5 pm in Lakowe
The rain had just finished its shift, brieflybut the sun refused to rear its bright face today.
Peering through the first floor of a building at the men
in reflective jackets pack their tools, my heart feels
packed with lead within my fragile chest. The mosquitoes
find their way out of wherever they hid to feast.
Nostalgia, too, feasts on my homesick head. Someone
is saying something about a flood. Someone is saying something
about drought back home. About hungry children crying
themselves to sleep. On the road, outside, unfolding
before me, like a nightmare, I watch a bus claim a woman’s leg.
In another version of this story, I am still mourning.
So much is lost.
So much is broken. So much is wrong.
The things I once relished remain untouched, longing
for my touch. So much bitter is let loose to steal
the laughter off a black boy’s mouth that I forget
how to cut my lips in the shape of a smile.
Forgive me, I do not recall how to be tender. Give me roses
& watch them curl up with thirst. All I have known
is hunger and not the mechanics of how to quench it.
Still, all I want is to slip out of dreamland and watch
the world’s mouth bursting with laughter. All the cuts,
lost in a labyrinth. See, is this not hunger, too?
A Love Poem II
For E.It was the year we stepped into the age
where scales were beginning to fall off
of our eyes. And we were quickly discovering
how much music the harp of our bodies could make
with all that warmth,
how much sweetness we could create, yet could break us.
It was the year you were leaving to never walk
back to us. Somehow, we were mourning but we didn’t
reveal it. Instead, we danced together on the last day
in that old room no one lived in anymore. The song
playing in the next street somehow was finding its way
to us. Tired, we sat sweating and laughing. As if
something wasn’t wilting inside us. As if the goodbyes
would take more than what was already gone. But that
was goodbye. The last dance.
It was the season of blazing suns & golden corn.
Those mornings of Igbo melodies entering their end
like a room. Like illness into the home of a body.
Everything was falling like an old fence.
I awoke one morning and there you were,
no longer with us. We’d learn to carry the weight
of your crushing absence. A lingering bruise.
Ayiyi Joel, TPC XVI, is an aspiring poet from Edo State in Nigeria. A Best Of The Net Nominee. Winner of the Shuzia Epiphany poetry competition. He emerged as a finalist in the Kofi Awoonor poetry prize ’24, Shuzia New Canvas poetry competition. He was longlisted for the Akachi Chukwuemeka poetry prize ’23, DKA poetry competition, Sevhage poetry competition, Osinimu Alao poetry prize. He has works published/forthcoming in Rough Cut Press, B’K, African Writers magazine, Rigorous, The Milton Review, Serotonin, Yarnz and elsewhere. Social media: Instagram @Ayiyi Joel and on X@ Joe-Xi Mao.
Art: Untitled Decisions, a visual poem by Robert Frede Kenter (c) 2025. X: @frede_kenter, IG: icefloe22, r.f.k.vispocityshuffle.
IceFloe Press 