your body is interesting

Taiwo Hassan, Nigeria

- for Ayofe

no, it's disgusting, he said. tonight, a friend showed me a grave, then he covered me in the earth that adorns its tomb and my thoughts sink before me. every living thing around a cemetery is a reincarnation of someone, or is it something?—riddle me this. who is strong enough to still latch on to this hollow world? i hold a scalpel next to my skin, and his, all in a bid to decipher this puzzle. the only thing i witness is stories of sacrifices trickling down as crimson reflections. not every house made in skin and bones is a home. ara ò ń sá fára—bodies know their kins no matter how lost or jagged or stretched they might be. i always bless the days i wake up to find music coursing through my veins. i've tasted mornings where my dreams are nothing but shards of faint realities, scattered, in limbo, wandering, only to resurface in the fleetingness of a moving car or split seconds of strange gazes. i once heard to be human is to seek out parts of you that still sing—do-re-me—to count the scars that still hum their wounds’ melody, to know those birthmarks that trace back to the origin of your names—àyọ̀fẹ́ - táyélolú - olúwapẹ̀lúmi - ọpẹ́yẹmí—to recognize the places that call us by our monikers and still show us that life too, can be far from a scale. this is where a mother’s cackles replace years of swollen backs and hot embers and leaked roofs and silent radios, where we walk this untarred road again, where we search for the bumps that our pasts flattened out, hoping they would better define these lumps in our chest, where we watch a crescent make a decent sky of us, feel crickets echo these wails we've made into walls and see stars replace all our buried tears, where for once, we hold our bodies as synonyms for everything celestial, as everything that wears the accent of glory. we'll shout out the yasssses in Nicki Minaj’s Super Bass and watch as eyes make a cynosure of us.

Taiwo Hassan is a writer of Yorùbá descent, a poet and a vocalist. A 2x Best Of The Net Nominee, his poems have appeared in trampset, Kissing Dynamite, Lucent Dreaming, The Shore, Brittle Paper, Dust Poetry Magazine, Ice Floe Press, Wizards In Space and several other places. He's also an undergraduate student of Demography and Social Statistics at Obafemi Awolowo University, Ilé-Ifẹ̀, Osun State, Nigeria. His debut chapbook, Birds Don't Fly For Pleasure is published by River Glass Books.