PARTING

By Muhammed Olowonjoyin

​In a dream of music, my grandfather knows
How much beat is enough to pull the cardiac muscles
From the scorn of being trapped between the walls 
Of this portal. & I am young enough a soul to know 
That I am not alive and he isn’t dead. That we’re just two
Souls transitioning between ash & star shine & dust. 

I hold his hands, and he says that each of the hundred
Darkness on his skin grew from when the universe 
Switched him from living on grace to living on distraught. 
I peep my body as we float out of the belly of a cloud &
It is suffused with glory like a night of werewolves.

I don’t know if we unwear them when we’re born. We sail
Through the purple lake of women who now have the faces
Of their children in their heads as feathers, & through 
The red lake of men reshaped into clinkers for not wanting
To vanish with the language of bullets. We eat fireflies & 
we dance, & we drink lights until our mouths glow neon. 

& like a colony of flowers, we become 
An abode for butterflies until a cleavage, sharp as a tooth, 
Rifts between us. And our hands fade into the stars.
Into a tale of two familiar strangers drowning in a dream of music.

​Writer's Biography

Muhammed Olowonjoyin, TPC III, studies Biochemistry at the University of Ilorin. He was third runner-up in the Nigerian Students Poetry Prize (2022) and was named Honorable Mention in the Kreative Diadem Poetry Contest (2022).

​His poems have been published/forthcoming in Stanchion, Quarter After Eight, Brittle Paper, The Bitchin' Kitsch, Aôthen Magazine, The Shallow Tales Review, Acropolis Journal, The Decadent Review, and elsewhere. He reads poetry for The Dodge Magazine.

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