Two Poems by Shitta Faruq Adémólá

Hemorrhage.

so go home / our bodies do not perform prodigies for a bastard / we do not fabricate guns to form teeth / so that it spills our tongues into / the future of a fine leper / at school / i teach my students how to hold a leaf / especially if it’s a dry one / at the mosque / i never in the first place prepared for a sujud / because our enemies do not always forget to perch / their arrows hold flowers that pin the neck with poisons / our bodies try to find beauty in a city of ugliness / we call it a research of water on a dry map / how a snail sails home with a broken carapace / i am no longer going to hold my breathe / for a fragrance the beauty of ash anymore / i know of a new ghost in the cemetery / who is audacious enough to embark on a beautiful / travelogue of wearing a new body / in a new skin / so go home / there’s reinforcement in recuperation.

 

cosmology

you always wonder this wound now 
has wings. 
forgive me first. i want to unmask the fire on 
my forehead to kiss earth a holy dance. 
a Gordon –
being safe is no longer a name a boy rakes. 
the universe begins with darkness. i am not to blame. 
my body is the genesis of a new universe. 
i am the God: Let there be a noise at the backyard of 
a garden. Let there be a flower with beautiful scents. 
Let this body be more gorgeous.

 

Shitta Faruq Adémólá is a young Muslim Poet, budding French linguist, phone photographer, and fiction writer From Nigeria. He is the author of a forthcoming microchap All I Know Is I Am Going To Be Beautiful One Day (Ghost City Press, 2021), and a chapbook Night Club With Dogs (INKspired, 2021). His works have appeared or are forthcoming in Jalada Africa, Dream Glow, Serotonin, FERAL, Third Estate Art, Rigorous Magazine, Icefloe Press, and elsewhere. He is the winner of the Fitrah Review Poetry Prize, 2021; a joint winner in the Shuzia PenProtest Contest, 2020; a joint winner in the Shuzia redemption poetry contest 2021, and a joint winner in PIN 10-DAY Poetry challenge (November 2020). He is a Poetry editor at Litround, and tweets @shittafaruqade1.