Mayowa Oyewale

to call a ghost a ghost

& we are walking into this mouth of night, holding lanterns before a black sea.
& we do not ask why this moon moons here, or why god forgot a star inside our eyes.
& we don’t know what’ll happen now that the birds have stopped singing, how many people
are dying of it [how many people are dead already]. &/or any other question about bodies
becoming a washbowl.

& the night snores on the sea now.
& we are still here holding each other’s hands, &
yet seeking ways to forge these stars into a key that might open
the moon door. &/but we forget the stars in our own eyes, flat lined light.

& see, we’re just bodies in every town’s cemetery  unable to talk about the silence in our
mouths. & see, we may be this or that, boy or girl, man or woman…
&/but we have no names for
ourselves.

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Mayowa Oyewale is Yoruban. He writes from Ile-Ife, Nigeria, where he is an undergraduate student of Literature-in-English at Obafemi Awolowo University. Mayowa has one of his poems in Memento: An Anthology of Contemporary Nigerian Poetry (Animal Heart Press, 2020) and another forthcoming at California Quarterly. A lover of photography, you may find the need to follow him on Twitter @https://twitter.com/mayowa__oyewale?s=.