Michael Agunbiade

Home

I name this place after the scars
covering the flesh of my mother’s back,
say a man who is yearning for love
opens his body into a room
& finds the picture of a man
roasting the skin of his lover into ashes.
At first, l thought home is the shoreline
where a ship returns to
after sailing through the ocean,
where boys listen to the dunes
talk about the memories of water.
But on getting there, l realized home is not home.
home is not the place l used to think. I mean
home is a graveyard
where the tongue as a dead body
learns about the origin of silence,
how darkness outgrows men
into a cathedral of voices.
Voices which falters on my mother’s lips
each time the bouquet of grief
in her chest sprouts a new flower.
In our backyard, I watched an arrow lurch through a tree
& struck the bird that lives there.
It was here I realized
what my grandfather meant by
death that does not kill outside
will find his way into your home as a guest.

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Michael Agunbiade is a young Nigerian poet who writes from the small hole of his room. His works are forthcoming in Afrimag, Kalahari Review & elsewhere. He was a longlist of the 2021 Nigeria Student Poetry Prize (NSPP).