Exile and Breaks
“and exile are the birds that exceed the eulogy of their songs.”– Darwish.
to exile things in your body is to allow a part of your body to break into light, a remonstrance,
and a litany of how you window yourself till you morph into a pellet.
ask a brother how he turned grey at 18 because his home is dressed as wounds he wanted to un-scar. and this too, breaks shape shifts him into a poem that reflects refract neglects him from himself.
ask a sister breaking kolanut in the yard, to write you an odyssey for things that breaks broke her, watch her ask if she’s not a skin to the earth, watch how she tells you the horse in her meadow galloped away,
watch this, watch that. watch how she describes these eleven stars as a travelogue of broken things. sometimes you have to break the hymens in your heart, watch how you vast into vanity casting a body into a place where all the language it she speaks is rottenness.
To be femme means to wife, to know the rules of breaking into darkness, to know how to untie shards of grief hanging on your neck, to know how to belly things that break you, again, till you break into the air, until you keep breaking till you break no more.
Do you know how to annihilate things, because here, being broken is how we sneak into past, and wherever our bodies are drawn drowned into.
Tajudeen Muadh is a poet from Osun State, Nigeria. He has works featured or forthcoming in magazines and journals such as Kalahari Review, African Poetry Magazine, Brittle Paper, Meniscus Journal, Bam Quarterly and elsewhere.
The Marbled Sigh 