BROWSE Columns
✕
for Brian, Jose, Michelle, Diana & Nikki
Still it weighs on me—this life—but thank you, what now makes me attend to it. Even though my nostalgia for the future I lost persists. While I have today, I want tomorrow and when it comes, the day after it. Shall I continue to fill my ears with noise to distract me from the noise inside my head, or do I give myself over to it? No. It’s not the emptiness per se, but more the returning to it. The new apartment. As it was before I left. But what a day we had! We sang It’s such a perfect day. And yes, it was. Thank you. The open road, the orb of light around my waist, beautyberries, the trail of ferns, the choral delight of Happy birthday to you, the creek we dipped our toes in, my back flat on a dragon’s tongue, the sighting of zebras that made me abandon whatever it was I was trying to say about the 23rd psalm, the thump thump thump of the kick drum on a song titled Soft that made someone say, Consistency can be soft too. And you, this morning, thank you. It is so kind of you to send me pictures of clouds. This one named mammatus, that one asperatus, this one lenticular. How spectacular. To be so moved
to wish to be as needful as rain
as, far from us, everything remains
tinted with the colour of firestorms.
Ayokunle Falomo is Nigerian, American, a TEDx speaker, and the author of African, American (New Delta Review, 2019) and two self-published collections: KIN.DREAD (2017) and thread, this wordweaver must! (2014). His work has been featured on/in The New York Times, Houston Chronicle, Houston Public Media, Write About Now, Michigan Quarterly Review, Glass Mountain, Berkeley Poetry Review, Santa Fe Writers Project, and The Texas Review among others. A recipient of fellowships from Vermont Studio Center and MacDowell, his poems have been selected as finalists or winners for Fourteen Hills Press’ Stacy Doris Memorial Award, Flypaper Magazine‘s Music Poetry Contest, The OffBeat‘s Poetry Contest, and Nimrod Journal‘s The Pablo Neruda Prize in Poetry. He holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Psychology from University of Houston, a Specialist in School Psychology degree from Sam Houston State University and is currently an MFA (Poetry) student at the University of Michigan’s Helen Zell Writers’ Program.
