Adedayo Adeyemi Agarau

first visit

the train halted & he walked out with everyone.
if you clap your hands together & flap them slowly,
my mother might mistake it for a bird, if you fold
your arms, she could name it after a rebellion. one
night, it rained so hard the winds blew off our roof.
if your papa was home, she cried. the windows open like
hands, the possibility of light filling a room built from waiting.
as he walks out in his yellow suit that asks the sun to go home,
my sister jumps, i grab her to be still. once, after losing
the dumpsite job, my mother said, what is yours is folded in your palms, even nothingness.
that night at home, my father rocked his old bamboo chair, looking
as emptiness ached from inside the echoes. my mother fetched a bowl of
eba with her longing hands wrinkled from the absence of touch.
i begin a poem that night by saying, & he walks home in a yellow suit.

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Adedayo Adeyemi Agarau is a human nutritionist, documentary photographer, and author of two chapbooks, For Boys Who Went & The Arrival of Rain. Adedayo was shortlisted for the Babishai Niwe Poetry Prize in 2018, Runner up of the Sehvage Poetry Prize, 2019. Adedayo is an assistant editor at Animal Heart Press, a contributing editor for poetry at Barren Magazine and a poetry reader at Feral. His works have appeared or are forthcoming on Gaze, Glass, Jalada Africa, 8 Poems, Hellebore, Headway Lit, Nitrogen House and elsewhere. Adedayo was said to have curated and edited the biggest poetry anthology by Nigerian poets, Memento: An Anthology of Contemporary Nigerian Poetry. His chapbook, Origin of Names, was selected by Chris Abani and Kwame Dawes for New Generation African Poet (African Poetry Book Fund), 2020.