ENIOLA ABDULROQEEB ARÓWÓLÒ
cw – death, war
Post-War Love Poem
after Natalie Diaz
they shake hands in that opaque building
here we are shaking bodies strewn in the wound
to know who else is still alive
in this plague, this ruin.
i have brought you wet carnations
to douse your burning heart. how much
ash was i before the war?
take those sooty apples, don’t forget the ash water,
the tarp—let’s have a little picnic, love, before we start
reading ourselves the aftermaths the war left us like a
child falling, crying at its first attempt at walk.
but who said this will bring tears? the war opened
us to a sprawling river, an ambitious reservoir.
reminder: please, don’t bleed the ears of our unborn kids with
how we woke up one day to gather limbs like a waste collector.
o, love, laugh a little, laugh & wiggle.
it’s a summer away—
chirp me a song: let the night shatter on us.
fractured bliss. grown grief…
Eniola Abdulroqeeb Arówólò (he/him/his) is a Nigerian emerging writer, frontier V and an undergraduate of Mass Communication from Kwara State University, Kwara, Nigeria. He is passionate about inequality, politics, domestic violence, and child rights. His works have appeared or forthcoming in Brittle Paper, Rough Cut Press, Poetry Column ND, Rigorous Magazine, Afreecan Read, Ice Floe Press, Rise Up Review, Inverse Journal, Better Than Starbucks, B’K magazine, In Parentheses Art, Rulerless Magazine, and elsewhere. He is the August winner of PIN-10 DAY POETRY and has been shortlisted in BPPC’s June/July Anthology. In his leisure time, he is either writing, reading or binge-watching cartoons.