HABEEBULLAHI MUHAMMED YUNUSA

today, a girl[insert space]friend asked if i was a cultist — /


later pleaded she only wanted to provoke the devil resident in my head / her query was a palette of pains on the canvas of my soft soul / i started weaving my emotions into a diatribe but my voice folded into itself when my memory (s)wept to the fore that

yesterday, a man returned his wife to her mother in a bag of empty clothes / he transmogrified her chichis he & their six kids consumed into cash & auctioned her body at the black market / same yesterday, some dicks forced their way into a house and a hijabi / made away|off with her parents’ world & her life / elsewhere a guy tweeted death to a lady as employment / went into her & interned [read as interred] her in a grave the depth of his conscience / just this morning, a comedian made tragedy of a minor’s sanctity / said satan should be blamed     not him

most times, the phallus is a pestle, grinding females into specks of vulnerabilities / but how do i knife my chest for my inquisitor to open my heart to where it is written in white that i am a psalm of balm? / which scripture do i verse myself into for her to believe i am a moses leading a pack of believers / whose manhood is unhungry for all shades of femicide? / i didn’t reply her / i dissolved my innocence into a hard morsel of guilt & swallowed it / with the sauce of sorrow she & many like her must have suffered / in the hands of the people of my gender

Habeebullahi Muhammed Yunusa (Baṣọ̀run), Fontier XV, is a nation of talents, is many person(a)s rolled into one: one of them is a poet in love with the shape and sound of words. He hails and writes from Ṣàárẹ́ (anglicised spelling: Share), a town in the south of Kwara State, Nigeria. Habeebullahi is currently a postgraduate student of English.

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