For Noa*

 

Like a sad nun would

kiss the holy book

innocence does not die

 

it is a flower that lives

in an open window

to see a smile

 

no one understands

unless they are us

 

survivors, not halves

we run our lives

in and out to sky

 

the world robs us

we go home to ourselves

 

*Noa Pothoven

 

 

 

 Tongue & Memory

 

I give my body to the hot and cold

a sacrifice to reward

memory on my tongue –

how ants inhale the concept

that sweetness is here

 

how ants find, crawl over sugar

take it to tongue, give me

a wet ground for my bloat

to stand and not walk, but

watch them carry uphill, that

 

which I can’t – I give to water

watch the sweetness breathe

the gills it would take

to be not six foot under

but breathing.

 

 

 Adura Ojo is the author of ‘Life is a Woman Breaking Eggs. British Nigerian & resident in the UK, Adura’s poems have found homes in Acumen, African Writer, Dryland, Mounting the Moon: Queer Nigerian Poems, Panorama: The Journal of Intelligent Travel, The Rialto, Paris Lit Up, Praxis, Sentinel Literary Quarterly, The New York Times, The Poetic Pinup Revue, and The Wait Anthology. Her poem, ‘Four Corners’ was highly commended in the Sentinel Literary Quarterly Poetry Competition, July 2011. Another poem, ‘When He Comes’ was featured in a poetry competition in the New York Times in January 2017.  A Pushcart prize nominee for her poem ‘Witch,’ Adura delights in letting her poems ‘misbehave.’ She likes to think that poems have their own minds.