Mothers & Tales
here, we are snowballs that drop. 
sometimes, we check up our cheeks to 
see if there are more stones to throw.
—childhood fleets too, we dare know.
mother has confessed of different stories
when she sat us under an Udala tree, where
our ancestry dangles their hatchet in case 
someone tries to ransack 
their remains. Don’t twitch your gazes, 
moimi told me the tale 
& our mothers do not lie, their lips only get 
reddened by the lard of a palm-kernel when they 
speak random truths. So say, you —
I dare say, I loathe halloween. Mother once 
told me there’s a grim reaper that escapes
from its demimonde every season to rip
out the guts of the children who shrug to
their mama’s words. So, I bandage myself
into a wrapper of mom’s every night
& lingo plummets on my tongue till all
I say is I love you, mama. Life is not 
a trinket of rebirth, or the ashes of a 
phoenix. Tomorrow, I might ask God to
make my mind the pigment of my retina.
& bath me in the red sea —till all I
drip is blue hue.
but that’ll be a poem for another day.