Five Stanzas
1Into the tree to burrow the lumber’s grain,
Plane the disordered bough’s shrine, fleece
The golden vapour & muss the mistral’s brawling plume
Down to its green nerve where the bud pants
After its first milk. From helm, bloom repeatedly
Until completely frond, like lancets stained
With tenebrous saints, already strained from
Their divine pigmentation.
2
That is the brew, the rum that darts down
The queen bee’s fur, stabs its amber into a broach
At the stripper’s heart, where all that impatiently taps
Pour from. & tongues are out undressed
Around her (her name is Money), lapping cowrie
Cluttered ankles, fitting her with the slow grind
& halt of coral beaded hips that cast angular whips
Through the slum heap— men spasming in the ebb
Of exhausted moans— deep in the bruise;
Oracles filling their skins with misuse.
3
On such untreated vellum, the green book
Began its ode. It is where the bátá beats the fire
Awake from its cured singe. With such a frenzy,
The basilisk discarded his foreskin & woe
To the works of men! The oblivious eddy shrugs
Off rubbish on the verandah. Ruins sag
Into keyhole beneath porch lamp, click
& creak into mortar & stone.
4
There are so many of them, fissures lunging
From bridge rail, craving to be lowered
Into the Udu’s breast and fed the murkish feast.
They lumber around the misery of old wives
And husbands, sons and daughters, siblings
To the sad eyed god of pleasure, waiting their bit
To pleasure the seed into a burn, for St Vitus
Breaks into them without vestments
Or penance, only the shallow sustenance—
5
Mute as whetted blade across vein—
uncorking sunset’s untutored blossoms;
tipping face into the rim of a brimful of gloam,
slips in quiet as her discarded charms surface.
The Delusion Stanzas
Unoka, poet of obscure genealogies,long the cowrie clatters non stop;
milk mouth to the loam suckle,
for the bone that sleeps, exchanging
colour with maggots for light, for activity.
Something moves over the face of this deep,
not God but dry leaves, rustlers of sound
from their immobile corral. They comb
your face, reveal the cavities
where wine must brim, must seam:
the onyx teeth soaked in the Styx
for an immortal gnashing, those coastal
pebbles polished green with lichen.
Did you move a pace, after the wind
rushed pass to shake again the rope
to your son’s spinning rictus? No?
As yet, your silent prophecies whet
the minds of birds with future feasts
where wings scatter their shoulders from
the burden of a far travelled flesh.
Speak through the mute translations,
where the weaving feet interred permanently
in a dance along your fictions and delusions
crosses the town square into the chaos
of this worm riddled land. Pick a bone
to blow, knit the music from the still lips
of this eroded soil; mud baked, the thin
faces that press against the globe
will cast their cries into the pit too.
All assortments of disjointed melodies
to follow, each strand will bear a body
down among the congregation to where
you may be handing out benedictions,
a gourd to salt the vocalist, to wind
the chord to its utmost wail.
Yet, O poet, where are the ears of corn,
the unripened frocks, green choir of fat
years and the pharaoh of that season?
Where are his hands around the meat
of the grindstone; scrape the tuber’s ash?
A Beautiful Shiny Thing
Stand where the asphalt endsand the neon light laughs in the voice
of the damned; where the doors slam shut
in the bread of blues and the men
slink and sag; where the parched seats
gleam with a liquid fire and the drunken
wire, you can come in but there’s no going back:
to the nine, to the five, to the mule and his rope
and his capitalist mumbo jumbo. Just hop on
a stool, toss down a shot or two. Kill time
with a girl or her friend or a memory or a lie.
Who’s running from their father’s belt
and there’s no end to the violent wails,
those beguiled hymns that spawn their saints
from the slums, from the bacha, from the vatican
of the lost. Just listen to the shadows pare
their nails, strum their strings and shrug into
the flesh of long limbed needs; take their ease
off cast-offs and mystical boys then mop
them off the floor. Ride them on the bed, or
on the garbage heap, it doesn’t matter where
you are, you can get it where you need it.
True. Here, take it. Yes you want it and it’s
the clearest heat in your arm, on your tongue,
down your throat, to your knees if you’re knock
kneed by the itch. It will eat you up and leave you
worn, you won’t know if you’re coming back from
the high or the low or the love that won’t heal you.
In this house on fire, this land of mines,
the tar leads nowhere but to the dregs,
and the ends and the gutted wax of their sleep.
Osahon Oka is a writer from the Bini/Kwale speaking part of Nigeria. His poems have appeared on Yarnz magazine, Poems for People of Interest, The Friday Influence, Pepper coast Lit, Poetry Sango-Ota, Ice Floe Press and elsewhere. A recipient of the 2022 Visual Verse Autumn Writing Prize as well as being the first runner up of the Kukogho Iruesiri Samson Poetry Prize, he lives in Benin City where he enjoys the rustic scene of bamboos, birds and long walks to and from work, while day dreaming of less hungry days, writing and revising poems.
Banner / Art: Night Season a visual poem collage by Robert Frede Kenter (c) 2026.
