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“Transit”, “Leaven”, & ”Arrive in Your Skeleton” | Poems by Abiodun Salako

“Transit”, “Leaven”, & ”Arrive in Your Skeleton” | Poems by Abiodun Salako

poems

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.

 

See Also
Two poems

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.

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