19 LINES FROM FRAGMENTS OF MY LOVE – Tajudeen Muadh Akanbi.
19 LINES FROM FRAGMENTS OF MY LOVE She carries the gods in her palm, and her painting, on the brittle glass, some grey-ash primroses, hummingbirds and some rose flowers lurking in her toes too. I wrote her name on my palm—her home. I feel how enthralling it is to have someone I love on the walls of my hands, I rewrite it, and a smile is engraved on my cheek. Her hair flutters, shuttering at the conundrums on the streets of Ikeja, which murdered her sweet smiles, and resurrecting it into a canto, filled with butterflies and sprouted petals. She glows the verses on the thin lines from the inklings written on the timber barks, then her iris, made the darkened room a burst of sunshine. Take! A cup from the afterlife, all things visible, half of a moon, in the skins of a bruised tooth and some tattered breadfruits—…