BIOMIMICRY

—after Julie Pratt’s “Powerlessness is the seed of liberation…”

A garden will forgive you
if you return with your hands open.

Rain pours itself into my garden —
it is resurrection.
Petrichor with pitter-patters,
tilling the deadness in me,
dragging out buried light.

In the brown-roofed house,
I watched my imaginations take form.
And she teaches me, every day.

When I say her,
I mean the mother who bled to raise me,
the soil that bruised my knees,
the rain that made me soft again.

I remember Màámi
humming over an earthen pot,
stirring smoke and stew
while I axe firewood.

The trees would watch me
study a mother bird.

There is a tenderness
in how it teaches its young
to trust the wind.

I hear the mother bird
whisper to its fledgling:

Let yourself surrender,
sink deep and heavy
down into the Earth,
and I
will nourish you there.

Fly.

MEMOIR

—after the Yoruba proverb: “Tí ewé bá pé l’ára òṣè, á d’òṣè.”

(If a leaf stays long enough on soap, it becomes soap).

I was not like the other boys—

I’ve never tasted gin, not even once.

Màámi warned that my throat was a grove where bitterleaf grew;

that its leaves would only sweeten once they reached my belly.

This was the memory of the day I snuck out to a liquor party.

That day, welts of hide-skin lashes bloomed on my back.

For the first time, I kissed heaven and tasted regret.

I remember Màámi, how her teary eyes were twin lanterns

searching every cranny of my stubborn heart for a crack.

And Bàámi—his voice never left my back.

Each word and each whip telling me:

“tí ewé bá pé l’ára òṣè, you will be just like the lost boys!”

“I will not do it again,” I promised the stars that night.

And my promise soon turned into a fear that morphed in my heart.

Even on a strange soil, my sight of enigmatic damsels

painted this truth—

that the sweetest of things could end a man.

So I buried my demons in exchange for a peaceful spirit.

Like a leaf, soft and readily lathered on soap;

I carried Bàámi’s whispers like truths in my chest.

I became the rain—falling gently on a sea that sings the storm.