Gbenga Adesina

Equinox

My friends have declared my sadness in winter can be cured by eating fruits.

There is a blue heaven inside Red Globe grapes.

There is a bitter heaven inside even ripe Starfruits. 

Still, the muscle of the mouth opens to sweetness.

There are days I go on Google Earth and swoop down

on the dust and red sand of a faraway house on a hill

where my mother lives alone with a small dog at her feet.

At evenings, she talks and laughs with her partner who is a sycamore seed inside the grave.

The dead, because they love us, water the roots

of our plants. Stems of berries grow from their lungs. My father is a tree of mulberries now.

I taste one to my mouth in this Brooklyn fruit shop and close my eyes.

In the country of my birth, my family, at this moment, kneels before a white altar

to mark the anniversary of a death.

But I’m hours behind them.

Time is the border around my body.

My friends, their laughter often begins here

and ends in other countries. They too know the sea.

So, we browse fruits stores. 

I clutch two Gwen avocados 

to my chest and declare them my mother’s history.

Anytime now, my pocket will ring 

and it’ll be my mother calling.

I have memorized the rim of her voice. She invented my face.

We’ll embrace through the white static.

Metaphor cannot redeem distance.

Outside the fruit store, I walk 

and see the small animals

of the island, who, though it’s dark now, walk on the gravels and paths

of a park and leave their tiny footprints on the white sand. 

Above, a full moon stands guard and watches over 

them as if it were their owner.

To whom do I belong?

Alien in Residence

  I had a dream

  that crying in public had been banned 

  and woke up crying.

  All our past and future dead. 

  All our past and future dead 

  animals among the choir

  of fossils.

  I keep a small red notebook by my bedside 

  where I tally the number

  of humans I love who are dead

  and the number of humans I love who are not dead. 

  I rest my head in the space in between.

  Distance, a priest told me, is not death.

  He also told me God invented death 

  to make us taste his loneliness. Empire, why are you afraid of my grief?

  At night when I cannot sleep

  and I can hear inside me the breath and heartbeats of my neighbors—

  those dead and those alive— through our paper thin walls. 

 I get off my bed, tip-toe across the room and trace my finger 

 around the face of my brother

 on his portrait on the wall.   

 Some evenings when I walk on the streets

 of Brooklyn, the shadow of a man swoops on me from behind — my brother, 

 whose face I have not seen in four years,

 who I miss desperately.

 Though when I turn to look

 no one is there.

Man Radiating Happiness

You are melancholy photographed in strobe light. You

look good. You are banjo with wood tufts. You

are baby wolf on the tar chair listening to Monk’s “Ruby, My Dear”

and quietly, then not quietly, weeping.

Your mother said you remember the way a trumpet

remembers wind. You

are Equinox playing from a stereo on a windowsill in Brooklyn at 4am

or the corked ear listening in the dark. You 

are the hymn in the throat of this city

that has tried but failed to kill you.

You are the cliff in the blue clefts of Coltrane Changes. You

are blue, not the color, the horn cry.

History invented your name.

Do you know your name?

You wear your weary well and call it jazz.

Your dance is a desperate signaling for help.

You are the ancient spell in the room. 

You are the shadow anointing the floor.

You are music without silence.

Music without silence, what are you

hiding?