Biotic | Adesiyan Oluwapelumi
The wind hosts a funeral.
I don’t feel too alive.
My heart whitewashed in bathwater.
I peel clean at the edge
of the butcher’s sabre. My haemorrhage
blushes. This is how
I remind you what I am?
What am I? I can’t discern
if the air is mourning or celibate.
The way my fingers mold the knolls
on my face like wild radishes.
Every touch retches me. I confess
and it is blasphemous.
I quiet and it crackles a potter’s
clay. I vase into forsythias
and the fuchsia rots.
I sit by a pool and feel the water.
Its inferno engulfs me. I mouth a cigar
and its smoke thins into a thread
crotcheting my veins. Nothing should
have to suffer this way. Not
the ellipsis groaning in my throat.
Again, God heaves into my sutures.
My carapace, like a gill, exhaling
stale air. The air is stale.
My bones a cracker of dry leaves.
In a pocket of blunt knives,
the lungs still wound.
My tremor is wolfsbane—light
sinewed in the silver of full moons.
I must burn. I am something alive.
About the Author:
Adesiyan Oluwapelumi, TPC XI, is a medical student, poet & essayist from Nigeria. Winner of the Cheshire White Ribbon Day Creative Contest(2022) & 1st runner up in the Fidelis Okoro Prize for Poetry(2023), he and his works are featured in 20.35, Fantasy Magazine, Poet Lore, Tab Journal, Poetry Wales & elsewhere.