📃 Daily(ish) poem → 00347 ◊ Door ◊ Olumide Manuel
Door
I do not know what hand opens dreams to dawns,
but I wake into the cry of the alarm. Sometimes
I’m out before it mouths. Then the bathroom door,
back & forth, & out the front door. There’s a door
in every greeting, so I greet my neighbours.
I greet the non-neighbours. I tip mama alakara
fifty naira, & when I’m not too winded away
in my morning woes, I toss the crumbs to strays—
I’m knocking doors that shouldn’t necessarily
open back to me. Somehow, I prefer the doorlessness
of Keke Napep to taxi doors or bus doors.
It reminds me of the one true love that shattered me
in the most comfortable penance-How we fell in
& out each other with unedged thorns,
doors absentia, wilding our bodies in full speed.
Arrows of clean delight, limbs oxbowed in floral wings.
Love, in full dramatic flight & crash.
So in every morning swing towards school
in Keke Napep, I hold the rail with my two hands,
sitting at the lip of its seats, where the lack of door
breezes the traffic teeth, & myself in subtle anticipation
of every possible ruin of a body. I shadow the entrance
of my exit, imagining my death like a true lover of life.
—Olumide Manuel
—found in Barrelhouse (Issue 24)