Transit
Between airports,
I lose pieces of myself —
a mother’s laugh,
an orison in dialect,
a taste for harmattan mangoes
What is exile
but a constant becoming?
I learn new silence
in every terminal,
the hush of gates closing,
the buzz of another name
mispronounced over a loudspeaker.
I carry too little,
then too much —
memories pressed into paper,
a worn passport
that can’t explain
the ache between stamps.
I say “home”
and it echoes back
like a place
that has moved on
without me.
In every arrival,
I find a version of myself
waiting
to be claimed
or left behind.
Leaven
You say you don’t know
how something so simple;
flour, water, time
can feel like worship.
But I’ve watched your hands
press into dough,
the way they once held me:
firm, certain,
never rushing the rise.
This house smells
like the middle of something —
yeast working its quiet miracle,
air thick with waiting.
Love is not the heat,
but the proofing:
how we give it hours,
days even,
to become something
worth breaking open.
You tear a piece
from the warm loaf,
offer it like forgiveness.
I take it like communion.
Arrive in Your Skeleton
Arrive in your skeleton,
the flesh is small.
It holds nothing
we cannot remake.
We can build you again
from dirt or tea or kiss,
from the breath of another
who speaks your name slowly,
like it’s never been said right before.
The body fails us,
yes.
But truth — truth waits like a stone
beneath the dust.
Let it be simple;
you are here,
bare-boned and burning
with the quiet will to be seen.
We’ll start with a hand,
then the wrist,
then the mouth that forgot how to ask.
We’ll mend what the world
has unwritten.
A kiss can do it.
A spoon of honey.
A name uttered in the right room.
Or silence,
held long enough
to make space for you again.
Arrive as ruin
or ash
or afterthought—
we will still call it beginning.
Abiodun Salako (he/him) is a Nigerian Journalist and Editor-in-Chief of Curating Chaos. His fractured pieces have appeared in Kalahari Review, Africanwriter, WriteNowLit, SledgehammerLit, DwartsMag, LocalTrainMag, Levatio, BullshitLit and elsewhere. Say cheerio to him on X @i_amseawater.