Abu Bakr Sadiq

Half Memory

with my arms wheeling back
and forth around your waist,
I watch as squashed tomatoes
simmer into a bloodish red soup.
you bend over the kitchen counter
to pick seasonings for me to unwrap
& crush. there's no point being here
if you’re focused only on eating,
you say, between mouthfuls of half
cooked bean curds. i wonder if
it is more about keeping me starved
than teaching me how to bamboozle
ingredients to morph into meals.
the first night we have pizza for
supper, I wake up in the morning
with crumbs of dough brewing
in my mouth. now that you are far
away in another world: i imagine
that you still go about collecting
mushrooms & garden eggs,
for egusi soup to be cooked over
charcoal stove; that you still grate
onions & pepper as if somewhere,
there are people who would pay
with their lives to eat from whatever
your hands ever cook. now that half
the memory i have of it is a hungry cat
with a swollen paw, dwindling across
an alleyway in the middle of the night—
the last time we ate tacos in bed
could’ve had a better ending if I did
not ask if you'd like to be buried with
a knife shoehorned between your hands.

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Abu Bakr Sadiq is a Nigerian poet. His poems have appeared in The Lit Quarterly, Uncanny Magazine, Augur Magazine, FIYAH Literary Magazine, Iskanchi Press & Magazine, Knight’s Library Magazine, Zone 3 Press Magazine, The Drinking Gourd, Rockvale Review and elsewhere. He writes from Minna. Find him on Twitter @bakronline