POEMS

Adebayo Samuel

my mother is dreaming her mid-life crisis as a recipient of domestic violence

 and I would  gently enter into that dream, wide awake, 

my feet blueing 

my father is pressing himself against another woman 

who is not my mother, shooting stars 

 my vein is white, which is to say I have bled enough

blood, enough trauma in my childhood.

 my mother is puzzled, she doesn’t know how to spell distrust. 

she says her father, and her father’s father were good men.

 this is a poem about good men, which is to say my father

is absent here, which is also to say in my mother’s sleep, 

 she is crying. once, I asked my mother  for my name

while we picked beans for dinner and instead, she put water in my mouth, swallow it: she said, and I did. 

and then I purpled,  elegy forming on my lips, lips breaking to 

 leak blood, my father’s palm unfolding from a punch,

punch lifting from lip, mother’s  lip in turn swallowing a cry. 

 sometimes, my mother would tear away like a page, 

half-written, tears filming her eyes, night carpooling

 around her skin while I’d welcome dawn, cold. homeless.