Vilomah
The grey-haired should not bury those with black hair—Karla FC Holloway.In your eyes, I could see them, the dead
at the crossroad. The village is adept at holding festivals
for dead things & the horn/ flute is playing earth into the bodies of women
who spent their lives at the sea searching for new wombs in gentle waves.
You aren’t dancing, sympathy is the night in your eyes with apertures.
In dreams, the stillborn will come again with thunder as
walk steps/ as baby ghosts mewling in bassinets/ as windstorms.
In the dark/ I can see your mother making the ritual
as she wears the pendant around your neck/ saying your face
is the face of Amunba/ Amunba who is your sister/ Amunba
who walked farmlands to farmlands seeking the voice of a dead child.
Fatihah Quadri Eniola reads Vilomah
Fatihah Quadri Eniola is a young poet from Nigeria, she is a member of HCAF (Hilltop creative arts foundation), Black Girls’Tales and Nibstears Poetry Cave. She has contributed a number of intricately constructed poems to literary journals including Art Lounge, The Kalahari Review, Beatnik Cowboy, Notion press, World Voices magazine, De Curated, Syncronized Chaos and elsewhere. She lives with a very cute cat, Honiy. Be her friend on Twitter.@FatihahQuadri
Art: Wings of the Land, a Vispo Glitch piece by Robert Frede Kenter (c) 2023. Twitter: @frede_kenter.
IceFloe Press 