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by @toluOloruntoba

I: Mesopotamia
frantic, we began to chisel entreaties into the silt;
amputate limbic snares;
spoon out our eyes, Hammurabic,
before we could see gleams in the dirt
and reach;
cut out this jewel death;
smelt sandbanks
into the Euphrates
with supplicant palms
to absolve the coral snakes, and ourselves.

then we were a monolith whittled and abstinent,
and fervent.
but still splayed on taboo.

II: Mummy of a Man
for Ötzi

Nimrod failed too, at this.
So when the last tin figures
leavening the fields within
with picks fell in sweat, or death,
we picked them up gentle,
and swaddled them with our inked body of railroads
carrying shame far inside like embryos grasping
bricolage in welcome,
and clocked the millennial glacier
with third hand, screes and sabered clues
as we slipped in.

But when the earth has warmed over,
and we are older than this winter,
fish us from this lightening fluid again.
we’ll be waiting downstream.

III: Delta
The weaverbirds are gone
with all the wheat.
aeons have shaved the world.
we are woken from centennial lullaby by shrill absence,
clay feet spent,
alluvial beside us on the plain.

after the martial trickle of our barge downhill,
now the surrogacy of fantasy is polished into seed.
fertile again, we’ll a grow our old prayer:
run away with us.


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