CLICK HERE to listen to “Becoming” by Ifeoluwa Ayandele
January, with its harmattan winds,
hanged with dead leaves on my window
panes. Its slender branches, bred a nightmare
of this hazy city on its fragile shoulders.
-& its night was a dread of how butterflies
found failure in faded flowers, without
the fresh foliage. -& I became this January,
one mid-afternoon. My mind became a house
furnished in the foliage of the harmattan haze
& I couldn’t find the knob to the front door,
for my living room was littered with unturned
furniture. I gazed at grandfather becoming
a clock ticking away in the hallway
on a Sunday morning, waiting for his sunset.
-& I, (like a paper boat, folded into a water basin
that children fuddled with on the playground—
splashing, soaking & laughing at its shred), re-
member how loneliness lurked around home.
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 22, Issue 4.
Ifeoluwa Ayandele is a Nigerian poet. His work is published or forthcoming at Shift: A Journal of Literary Oddities, Tiny Spoon, Drexel Paper Dragon, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, Rigorous, The Concrete Desert Review, Ghost City Review, RATTLE, The Ilanot Review, Pidgeonholes, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Verse Daily and elsewhere. He tweets @IAyandele.
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