“Zendaya” by Rabiu Temidayo

She takes the microphone to record
messanic rendition.

A woman in cream-coloured Sombrero:
in patri-coloured blouses, in front

of the main speaker, crusading
post-feministic ideals, platoons.

Listening to Miles Davis on a West
Abbey night, slips on a couch, watching

Neymar score. Half-filled milkshakes
on VCD player, handmade napkins on

bar stools, purple frills. VCD trembling
to the beat of spoken word poetry.

Empty parks rearranged into theatre,
for movie night. Film projectors emitting

Laser beams on whiteboards, spread
on pinecones. Korean film, French New Wave,

Spaghetti Western,
musical accompaniment to the fern shadows.

She meets Andrew on Karaoke night,
on Ketamine.
Same truths, different translations.

Improvisations reinstitute the arabesque
deco on
linden walls. Her intellect, her psionic childhood.

Decoration newspapers on the freshly
aubergine-painted houses, chloroform.

Paul Klee in her twenty somethings, strolling through midtown Boston.

Photographs tagged July 3rd, 1987
in the discarded microwave from Baden-Baden,
along

with National Geographic, newsletters.

Great grandfather in an antique rocking chair somewhere in the sycamore shade,

his elbow on a lawnmower, noir. Two
boyfriends, one from Nigeria. In disuse,

She
talks Newtonian fluids with the shampoo,

with bush-shrikes, peckerbills, black kites
on aubergine, chestnut trees.

New Orleans Jazz over ashtrays, outside

bananas leaves
in prostration to the lichenous walls.

On movie night
she

set the moon, its principles, across the jagged mansards—

On the street, men in power bikes and bandanas protest the death of shoe-gaze

Walking over her with Madeline,
With no fashion sense she feels no sense of danger.

In the block houses, she’s revering
minarets of Istanbul, TV antennas, ithyphallic epochs.

An introvert, her transnational life
is
crawling
with airplanes lifting foot up from La Guardia, masons,

pylons being put up, another down.
Muslin curtains illuminated by FOX News,

The reverberation of the spread of a
new epidemic, Trump on Space Force.

She dismantles xylophones on the
front-yard with Garth,
goatskin
bags, illuminate the ash-coloured destitutions,

She reads the Torah
to dispense her own pneumas.

Leave Andrew on mute on WhatsApp.

Across chrome-coloured shards of a broken broken home,
clinical thermometers, across airbrushes, aerosols,
rat poisons, rheostats, even Spain.

She walking through the fire she resolves with au pain
and wine, contrition—

Towards the linen sequinned in gemstones on Broadway,
and Angel Deradoorian.

Every t-shirt that walked up to her is made of the same material, men,

Now she’s walking across to you, from Yale.

Rabiu Temidayo writes critical essays. He is in school of psychology, he studies art and photography. He reads for Tinderbox Journal. He published Daylight (2018), on Ghost City Press. He is published on Crepe and penn, Arsonista, Ric Journal, Cosmopolitan Hotel, Selcouth Station, Bone and Ink etc. Twitter: @rabiutemidayo