“Translucence” by Olúwádáre Pópóọla

We didn’t have to start anyway,
dropping one leg into another into earth
to be called bodies where roots run far into a chapel.
To start loss, we must name a place
like a broken petal that found peace in the mouth of a boy,
with thread spooled like silvery webs around his bare body
of his mother’s tongue planted in soft-liners beneath his feet,
loss for beauty spread high angel-white within his teeth,
pulling benighted cloth-ropes into the beaks of rainbirds
faceless with longings,
foreboding rain that gave names to the fear
slung on the shoulders of crack-brown walls,
our names evoked anger thronged into osiers
carried home in the best English,
silken enough to slip between gap-toothed doors,
unable to be heard and a smile spreading
like a commonwealth that gave glory to syllables like ta-ttered dre-sses.
Like god, we sieved water into grounds
too hard to spring flowers enough to not skip hairbreadth,
glory to the moon,
subtle rogues enough to span a countryside,
swollen chest-fields bursting out of cultured bellies into gilded scars.
A boy is the thin line between razor and skin.
What gives glory to name if not expectations?

Olúwádáre Pópóọla is a 19-year old Nigerian poet, a student of Microbiology and a Sports Writer for a media company. He writes from a city named by rocks and longs to see the world without discrimination of any form. Learning the art of imagery, his poems are up/forthcoming on Mineral Lit. Magazine, Headline Poetry & Press, Feral: A Journal of Poetry & Art, Roadrunner Review, Lumiere Review, Radical Art Review, Versification, Cypress Poetry Journal, ang(st)zine and elsewhere. He can be reached on Twitter @Kunmi_sher.