Editor’s Note
There is a slippage of sorts that I enjoyed, regarding the topographic arrangement of physical objects in Abdulbasit’s poems: my eyes walked/ with a bullet horsing into a body or the mother’s soul that flew out of the city…in the form of a bluebird.
In My Mom Was A Bluebird Singing Elegy, for instance, concerned with the nature of change, Abdulbasit sets the closing image of the poem by building the bird, upwards—that flies through the expanse of the city—using the air, sun & dust, name & a herby voice. There is no species or genus to this bird; instead it is a compilation of scenes, images and objects from the un-named city scape through which it attains freedom.
Contrastingly, the word gun is arranged to resemble or re-assemble the object, as if the violence surrounding the object is extirpated by tracing its shape. Abdulbasit’s empty gun—along with the other objects in these poems— have a register of thingness to them, a status an object claims when it no longer serves its common function or, when its meaning exists in a state of constant flux.
Abdulbasit’s ability to narrate these transformations is exciting to me because the language, filled with wind–owless huts and waste onto roads, is constantly undergoing physical evolutions. This asks the reader to experience the objects as changing and active, rather than interpreting them as fixed, passive or mute things.
—Amal Mathew
The Bombay Literary Magazine
everyone carries his address in his pocket so that at least his body will reach home. —Agha Shahid Ali
inside a dream, my eyes walked
with a bullet horsing into a body.
then i clove the dream like
a coconut & poured out
which of these mountains is degrading
into soil again, like its water. then it
day(ed)—like every another day,
a sunny, white sheet. but
my grandma’s radio stained it with palm
oil—announced how gravity is outside
searching for parts of bodies.
forgotten under the sun by their country.
forgotten into the night. into the festivity of their country. wrapped up into few
numbers by headlines. fuck them,
will there ever be a number for raindrops?
for our pain? a few feet away from home,
a man stared at the empty
space beside him. his silence (sp)ringing.
i offered him a bottle of water, he salted—
slashed the silence with the word gun
the word gun
the word gun
& the unrepentant tone made
by guns, after baring bodies. he added:
i gas whenever i hear of homes
which lost their children & found them dead.
i didn’t lose my wife. but a bullet was tagged lost
& my wife’s chest became its refuge. beside us, a
boy sang Odumodublvck’s Firegun,
the butterflies pollinating the flowers
around us, skied their wings.
it’s no one’s fault. here,
any sound, even
if it’s from a harp,
resembles that of a gun. here,
every hand folds prayers
in their right palm & their identity
in their left. fuck the country
that ghosts us. ghosts our homes.
& remember, loneliness is still time spent
with the world.—Ocean Vuong
i name all my instabilities at their entrance. because whatever has its head pressed
to a beginning, surely has its legs guilty of an exit.
& i do not want to mistake a spade for
a shovel. i do not want to use paracetamol for an abdominal ache. though in my hometown,
mental illness is mistaken for madness.
i dare not say i’m sick when it’s not headache nor cough nor malaria. because how do
i explain to them what anxiety is. call it dark -ness. too deep it devours all the verbs in me. but all they say is, you’re breathing, eating,
moving, sleeping, smiling… what they do not know is that all these are possible even when only existing. even when my life is a kite being wheeled by wind.
& how do i say i’m lonely when obviously i’m always in their circle? when my friend misinter preted it into being single? call it dryness
of a blossomed breast. my people don’t give room for such illnesses. instead, they question your age and the mouths you’re feeding, bothering you.
they call you youngling. but they do not know these illnesses are ancestral. & whenever they die, they resurrect—a gumiho. so don’t blame me if
i tell you today i’m hosting anxiety.
only for tomorrow to host loneliness.
and choked by ptsd the day after.
please don’t tell me to unshell myself from these kinds of things. what you name these are what is left of this body. i’m afraid without them, i’m nothing but a shell.
today, there’s no tooth to whiten
the darkness that succeeded the light
in this journey. but trust me,
the route cultivated a mango tree—
pluck as many ripened fruits
for your heart. before we waste onto road,
know that time has pecked my brain
& flighted some memories inside.
this journey began when
my dad drove us to the brown city
hosting my mom’s moribund
body. sun & dust yellowed the plants
rooted at the waist of the road.
a stretch of my neck sighted butterflies
walking the petal on a purple flower
down the aisle of another. some ladies,
barefooted, clay pots of water on their heads,
flashed us their hands & teeth. a man holding
a hefty hoe on his shoulder, facing
an assembly of corns, howled someone’s name.
& a herby voice leaped out of the farm
as did one of the squirrels reddening their
eyes…i am sorry. the childhood me
-mory is bleached from here—almost
out of my brain’s sight. therefore
let us teleport to the hut housing my mom.
don’t worry about the dog barking
at our arrival. about the wind
-owless of the hut—breeze enters
through the grasses ceiling it. okay,
let us continue; my mom, with her saturated
legs, her lemon laughter, her desert lips,
her blue eyes the hue of sea, housemaided all
the happiness of the world. i am not sure of
how many hours we used there, not sure of all
the things we did but take this;
at our departure, my mom’s soul
flew out of the city,
in the form of a bluebird.
singing elegy.
Acknowledgements
Image credits: © Max Ernst. Shell Flower (1927). Material: Oil on canvas. Dimensions: 9 x 24 cm. Image courtesy: Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid.
Max Ernst liked painting shells. The painting featured here is of a specimen not found in Nature, unless the term includes the artist’s imagination. Does the painting seem to exhibit unusual texture? That’s because the canvas was laid over a rough object and paint scraped over the surface, a technique that surrealists refer to as “grattage”. Not to be confused with “frottage” which is condemned, and deservedly so, in decent circles.
Abdulbasit A. Olúwaníshọlá’s final poem in the set, textured as they are with ancestral burdens, anxiety, illness and loneliness, ended with the narrator identifying with this house that is not a safe house. Shell, soul; we sensed a match in textures, and ergo.
Author | Abdulbasit A. Olúwaníshọlá
Abdulbasit A. Olúwaníshọlá, SWAN V, is a young Nigerian creative writer from Ilorin. He studied Agriculture in Usmanu Dafodiyo University Sokoto. He is the recipient of Dark Poetry Scholarship 2025 and was shortlisted for Unserious Collective Fellowship 2024, Augur’s Annual Microfiction Poetry Prize 2024 and a finalist in the 2025 Eggtooth Chapbook Edition and Sundress Light Bill Incubator Microgrant. He loves cats but remains scared of raising one by himself. [Source: Author’s text]
